Hermanos de niños con cáncer: resultado de una intervención psicoterapéutica

Abstract

Diagnosis of cancer in children involves a major socioemotional confl ict for the whole family. As parents, in these families, devote all their energies to the sick child, the needs of siblings are normally less considered. The feelings that the healthy child experiences may be aggravated when: they don’t receive reliable information explaining parents attitudes, there isn’t an adequate emotional communication context, they are not encouraged to involve with the sick brother and when they aren’t offered the necessary assistance to help them perform their daily activities. In order to provide psychosocial support to this children the AECC in Barcelona helds, annually, ludic-therapeutic camps aimed at siblings of children with cancer throughout Spain. The aim of this study is to demonstrate whether there is a relationship between their level of the participation of siblings in their camp and communication about their illness, involvement with the sick brother and emotional expression by siblings. This study used a sample of 74 children who attended the camp voluntarily. A pretest-posttest quasi experimental design of a single group was carried out. The results show that there are statitistical signifi cant differences between parents and children’s perception in relation to communication about the illness of children. Moreover these results let us conclude that this changes are due to the ludic-therapeutic intervention.