I love Sesame Street. I still know the songs that I learned while watching it many years ago. Sesame Street teaches children much more than letters and Spanish though. After all, life isn’t always a “Ladybug Picnic”. Sesame Street has always engaged in difficult discussions, engaging children in their classic age appropriate ways. Soon, Sesame Workshop will tackle the tough topic of the death of a parent.
The show, which will air during primetime so that families can view together, is a part of the Talk, Listen, Connect project. It was originally launched to support the special needs of military families. Katie Couric will host “When Families Grieve” when it airs on April 14 at 8:00 EST (on PBS of course) The show will feature families who have lost loved ones as well as Elmo and his family discussing the death of a beloved uncle. The program will help foster communication and provide coping ideas and strategies. There will also be supporting materials available after the program through the Sesame Street website: www.sesamestreet.org/grief.
If you head to that website now, you can preview some of the show’s content. Clips are also available on www.youtube.com. The scenes are poignant as they handle a variety of the challenges that surround explaining death to a child, including the permanency of the loss.
Sesame Street Workshop also handles a serious health diagnosis in “Here For You”. The content surrounds a critically ill child but many of the emotions and learnings may also be appropriate for other families facing ill loved ones. The DVD was distributed to hospitals and pediatric care centers so you may want to check with your local facilities, child life specialists or medical social workers for more info. You can also visit the Sesame Workshop webpage at www.sesameworkshop.org/.
I just discovered an amazingly honest and heartbreakingly poignant post written by a mother as an apology to her children. She is apologizing for the ways that her daughter’s leukemia has impacted her other children and her parenting. Although this is a childhood cancer story, it is amazingly similar to the feelings that parents have about the impact of parenting through cancer.
I can say that I have felt many of these during the course of my husband’s diagnosis and treatment. Beyond that, I will let her speak for herself: A Letter of apology to my kids.
Who knew? Lance Armstrong and Arthur? Really? It’s brilliant, just brilliant!
The Lance Armstrong Foundation and ARTHUR have collaborated on an clever project to reach children and their grown ups. What better way to start the conversation about cancer than to do it through the story of ARTHUR and his gang? I don’t know about you but in my house, many a library book features ARTHUR.
The episode will air daily this week. There is a fantastic Family Activity Guide that accompanies this project and is available as a free download through the Lance Armstrong Foundation. This guide, “When Someone You Know Has Cancer”, is full of tips and discussion points for families. It also covers the ARTHUR story that is airing this week, featuring the lunch lady, Mrs. MacGrady, and her recent cancer diagnosis. There are tips for parenting through cancer, suggestions for games that facilitate conversation and a discussion about talking with children of different ages. The show introduces ways that children can help someone who is sick, most of which are just great ways to be a friend in general.
But the resources don’t stop there. The Lace Armstrong Foundation has also developed school curriculum to support these conversations in the classroom. What an amazing idea. We know that our schools act as a support network for our children in many different ways and this curriculum will allow teachers to talk with their students about the diagnosis of a child or adult close to them. Please click here to visit The Lance Armstrong Foundation Classroom Resources. I encourage you to also check out the links at the top of that page to see the tremendous resources available to classrooms and to families who would like to introduce these ideas to their schools.
My son’s preschool class is learning a very important lesson. They have read the story “In My Heart” by Molly Bang which reminds them that even when children are away from their parents, we keep them in our hearts. He came home with a heart necklace that he decorated on one side and we will glue a family picture on the other side. Once returned to school, it will be a simple way for him to look at our smiling family when he is sad or feeling lonely at school.
It seems to me that this same technique can be used when it is illness that separates parent from child. It might be a hospitalization that physically separates them or just an extended illness that causes more absence in the routine than usual.
I do similar rituals when I need to travel for work. If I have to leave before he awakens, I fill the bed with his stuffed animals….all lined up to smile at him when his eyes open. Or I place notes in strategic areas to let him know that I love him and miss him: at his place at the table, in his car seat for school, in his shoes for when he goes out to play. These are really simple acts that have helped us both with our separation.
What simple things do you do to ease the transition of your absences? What physical item does your child have to remember you when he is feeling lonely? In the worst case scenario, have you prepared these types of reminders for after you’re gone?
We went to the oncology office this week for the regular follow-up appointment and subsequent deep exhalation of stale and pent up breath that we have been holding for too long. Good news awaited in the form of a clean scan and future appointment are scheduled in hopes of explaining some concerning symptoms.
It did amuse me, though, when the provider greeted our son and remarked how we always brought “great things to entertain him”. It makes me wonder what other famlies with small children in tow do to keep their own little people happy. We have no nearby family so our son is frequently along for the ride. I also hold the opinion that it makes the situation less mysterious and hopefully less frightening to children to come along and see what it is all about. It is easier to talk about the doctors that are helping Daddy to feel better if he gets to come along and meet them and see their friendly faces.
So, with that in mind, here’s a peek into our little box of tricks…
Our little guy is four now but he was two when we startd our regular trips to this office. Preschoolers might enjoy watching the actual exam of Mommy or Daddy but there is often a lot of waiting before that part happens and ever that has a limited time offer. We have always taken some new amusement along with us to keep him busy and happy for a visit that is always longer than expected. Sticker books have been his addiction off and off for much of the last two years. After all, cancer magazines might be fascinating to me but they don’t hold much attraction for him. There have been coloring books and backpacks with snacks on a visit or two. Even a few select Matchbox cars have made the trip although that one can be risky depending on the day. In a pinch, there is always the back of a random envelope and a pen for tic-tac-toe or scribbles. We have also been known to bring the portable DVD player with a set of headphones. We don’t allow much screen time for him so a movie is a particular treat that he does not often have. (I seem to remember Frosty the Snowman playing in it during a holiday time appointment.) This time we had his Leap Frog Tag reading system with one earphone in his ear and the other in mine. And the office always has a jigsaw puzzle in some degree of completion and at recent appointments, he has delighted in contributing to that project while we burn some time the waiting room.
My survival tips for my husband’s medical appointments are simple. If our son is sick, he does not enter the waiting room. When he could not go, that meant I could not go. I suggest you have a back up plan or a friend that you can call in a pinch. Bring plenty of guaranteed diversions. If you can sneak something new into the bag, it just might help to save the day. Headphones are excellent for not only containing the noise we might create but also for helping us to shield him from excessive information at a young age. There are not often young children in waiting rooms so I have found that most patients and staff are happy to see a child in the office as long as the noise and chaos are under control.
Follow the clinic’s rules and wishes regarding children and where they are allowed to enter. Remember that chemo targets rapidly growing cells and what are children? Fast moving bundles of rapidly growing cells! Infusion areas are usually off limits for young children. Treatment days might be a good time to arrange a play date so that everyone has an easier day.
There is a bit of guilt that was packed into that backpack too. When I had to choose which of my boys to be with on any given day, I always grieved having to make that choice. Sending my husamd to infusion alone was sometimes a necessary evil. Sending my son off with someone else or constraining his enthusiam in the appointment never made me feel like Mother of Year either.
Let me hear form you. What survival tips did you employ to keep kids under control in the medical office setting?
There is a hill in town that our family doesn’t often travel. There are excellent reasons to go up it but we just end up on other paths. My son and I drove up that hill this weekend on our way to a play date. From the backseat, his little voice said, “Mommy, this is how we go to get treats for Daddy” And he is right. At the top of this hill is a wonderful little bakery where he and I would go while my husband sat in the infusion chair. It’s where our son and I would go to pick up treats for Daddy and for ourselves before heading to pick him up from Chemo.
Part of my heart is breaking when I hear this because I can’t believe that he remembers this: it was almost two years ago and he was only two. Part of my heart is breaking that his first memory about this road is the bakery instead of remembering the park where we are headed today. Part of my heart is breaking from the guilt that I still feel from having to choose between my husband and our son each time he was scheduled for chemo. We live the entire United States away from our families and the impact of that was never felt as acutely as during his diagnosis and treatment.
But part of me smiles because if this is what he remembers about Daddy’s treatment then I am okay with that. If he remembers getting treats and special days with Mommy while Daddy was at the doctor’s, then I must have done something right. I remind myself what I had told myself back then; that I could decide to treat these days as special days off work with our son instead of the awful dark days that they could have become in my mind.
But his words were a powerful reminder to me about the memories of children and how they have the capacity to capture memories in a steel trap of a brain. And what they trap there, we don’t always have control over as parents. But I believe, and always try to remember, that we do have the ability to tip the odds in our favor about what they might remember someday. We can make choices to help those memories be mostly good for our children even when the context that we put those memories in as adult might be less than our favorite.
So, I’ll be good with the fact that today, at least, his memories are filled with treats and trips with Mommy even if that isn’t only what his Daddy and I remember about those months.
I always suspected that we adults don’t give the children in our lives enough credit. I just stumbled upon an article that seems to confirm it. A NCI Cancer Bulletin from 2006 describes a few of the findings from a small study of women with breast cancer and their children. It indicated that while we adults are figuring out what to say about a cancer diagnosis or when to say it, our children (ages 6-8 in this study) are already on to us They suspect something is wrong before the adults in their lives confirm it. And then it seems, that we stop short before completely fulfilling their need for information. No surprise, either, that the adverse effects of cancer treatments are not lost on our children even when we’re trying hard to pretend that they don’t notice.
Check out the link about for more details and also visit www.cancer.gov for excellent tips, talking points and resources for your older children.
The Family Connections Program at Dana Farber Cancer Institute has a very comprehensive resource page for families parenting through cancer. Among other topics, this site tackles the issue of giving information about your diagnosis to your child’s school.
This seems to be one of those sensitive areas of communication. Does you child want his/her teacher to know? Do you want every member of the PTA and soccer team to know? Is there not one place where your child has the ability to escape your reality? Yet, where does your child spend a vast majority of his/her waking hours?Who might be in a better position to know when your child is struggling than the teacher? After all, chances are that the teacher doesn’t have chemo brain and isn’t tossing and turning through the night over medical procedures and the bills that follow.
Please check out the resource page at Dana Farber Family Connections for tips and hints about successfully communicating with the school and other helpful topics.
I spoke with Meredith Cooper of Wonders and Worries the other day. This organization has tremendous resources for children in families with parents affected by cancer or other significant disease. She said something so profound, it really made an impact on me. She mentioned that these children all experience some type of loss. It’s a range of loss, to be sure, but they have all had something taken from them.
It really made me think about what is at risk fr a kid in this type of situation. This obvious loss is the big one…the death of their parent. But maybe it is the loss of their ability to fully act like a child due to increased responsibility, stress or parental time and attention. Or it’s the loss of a normal routine. Maybe it’s the loss too of the other parent in the stands of a concert, ball game or track meet. Maybe it’s simply the loss of a true, full meal deal birthday party for germ control reasons.
Some huge, some big, some small…but all loss. And who am I to say which ones are okay and which ones will really knock the wind out of a child?
Over and over, I come to the conclusion that the cancer patient is not the only one who qualifies for the “survivor” name tag? Hasn’t everyone in the family survived in some way?