COPING WITH CANCER IN TEENAGERS AND THEIR PARENTS

The diagnosis and treatment of cancer in adolescence requires that patients and their parents learn to adjust to many illness specifics stresses. Coping has an important role to adolescent's adjustment. Parents are the most important individuals in child's support system therefore they are correlated with the child's coping abilities. So, determination of the correlation of parents and adolescents between 11-17 years coping with pediatric cancer, a correlation study was conducted within which the correlation of parents and adolescents between 11-17 years coping with pediatric cancer was assessed. Questionnaires were used to gather the data and 120 patients and their real parents took part in this study.Findings showed that there was a positive liner correlation between adolescents engagement coping, (r=0.596,P=0.000) and disengagement coping (r=0.491,P=0.000) with their parents. This relation, regardless of age and gender was existed. And this was more between adolescent between 11-14. Engagement coping was stronger in those between the age of 11-14, meanwhile, between the age of 15 to 17 disengagement coping seemed to be more. Besides girl in engagement and boys in disengagement coping with their parent’s coping was emerged.According to the findings nurses can correct and promote adolescence’s coping strategies by teaching engagement coping to patient’s families and introducing counseling services. Promoting coping strategies, we also recommend that authorities provide extensive legislated plans and designs for counseling and teaching units. Since coping has Multidimential process, the researchers suggest a qualitative study on the same topic.