Two worlds: Adolescents' strategies for managing life with a parent in hospice.

Objective: This study aimed to generate an explanatory model of the coping strategies that adolescents employ to manage the stressors they experience in the final months of their ill parent's life and shortly after their death.

Method: The sample included 26 families of adolescents with a parent receiving care in a large hospice program in northeastern Ohio. A semistructured interview was conducted with 14 ill parents, 17 well parents/guardians, and 30 of their adolescent children before the parent's death and, additionally, with 6 of these families after the death.

Telling adolescents a parent is dying.

Background: When a parent is terminally ill, one of the major challenges facing families is informing children of the parent's condition and prognosis. This study describes four ways in which parents disclose information about a parent's life-threatening illness to their adolescent children.

Methods: We audio-recorded and transcribed 61 individual interviews with hospice patients who were recruited from a large hospice in northeastern Ohio, their spouses/partners, and their adolescent children.