Father to father: focus groups of fathers of children with cancer.

Caring for a child with cancer is a demanding experience for both parents, yet most research focuses on mothers. In this paper, we present the findings of a secondary analysis of data from a study in which the care-giving experience of fathers is investigated. In two focus groups, ten fathers provided first-hand information about caring for a child with cancer and its impact on their families. In addition, the findings demonstrate how these men through sharing a deeply meaningful and challenging experience offered mutual support and caring. This paper describes the fathers' remarkable and unexpected exchange. Social work implications are also addressed.

Father-to-father support: fathers of children with cancer share their experience.

Fathers are important to the stability of the family and to the coping of mothers and their children when there is a child in treatment with cancer. The vulnerability they experience is stupefying and causes self-doubt, general worry, and frustration with the medical care they receive. Fathers' experiences are relatively unreported in the literature, and even less so, the experiences of fathers with children who have cancer. This research is based on two focus groups of five men each who spoke unabashedly for more than 2 hours about their grief, their struggle to come to terms with the diagnosis and the role strain, and role confusion they experienced as fathers and husbands. The findings could be described as reflecting the following themes: (1) impact on the provider role, (2) the emotional impact: I cry privately, (3) it's the fight of our lives, (4) tag-team parenting, (5) hypervigilance, (6) that place is scary!, and (7) what happens next--coping and moving on. The group format was powerful in terms of what these men were willing to share of themselves and their experience. These groups could be characterized as the coming together of strangers, bound by the common experience of "cancer," who actively supported each other and each other's process. Implications for holistic nursing practice are provided.