Parental Experiences of Work and Family Conflict While Parenting a Child with Cancer

The occurrence of work-family conflict is one that many parents with children experience, however, working parents whose child has received a diagnosis of cancer face additional unique and seemingly insurmountable challenges in family and work expectations. The work and family conflict (WAFC) scale, caregiver distress scale (CDS), and financial toxicity (COST) instruments were completed via self-report by 156 participants. All 156 participants were organized into a crisis (n=15), chronic (n=90), terminal (n=49), or “other” (n=2) group based on the time since their child’s diagnosis, time-to-treatment, or type of diagnosis given. The participants in the “other” group were excluded as they did not provide a description of their child’s current diagnosis so they could not accurately be placed into any of the three groups. The participants answered six qualitative questions resulting in 833 individual responses. Deductive thematic analysis was utilized to examine the experiences and perspectives of the participants that completed the study. Reliability analyses showed good internal consistency for all quantitative scales. I conducted one-way ANOVAs, correlations, and a multiple regression analyses to answer the research questions. There were no statistically significant differences in work-family conflict, caregiver distress, or financial toxicity across the crisis, chronic, or terminal disease phase; however, work-family conflict was significantly correlated with caregiver distress and financial toxicity. The results suggest that two of the caregiver distress subscales, relationship distress and social strain, were predictors of work-to-family conflict while a third subscale, personal cost, was the only predictor of family-to-work conflict. Collectively, I found that parents will experience a wide array of positive and negative emotions, thoughts, and perspectives of work-family conflict over the course of their child’s cancer diagnosis.