“He just had a different way of showing it”: Gender dynamics in families coping with childhood cancer

Abstract

This article draws on qualitative in depth interviews with mothers and fathers in thirty‐five families in which a child has been diagnosed with cancer. Gendered patterns in which mothers and fathers deal differently with both emotions and emotional needs when their child has cancer are examined. It is argued that the gender dynamics which develop are the consequences of a complex mixture of external constraints and internal inclinations. The research found important commonalities in the ways in which women as a group and men as a group deal with child cancer. Fathers’ tendencies to distance themselves emotionally from the illness resulted in a reluctance to talk, the playing down of the impact of the diagnosis and an unrealistic, overly optimistic stance. In contrast, women's coping mechanisms involved a much more close‐up emotional engagement with cancer in which some women became so immersed in their child's illness they felt that they were drowning. The article concludes that the accommodations most couples reach when their child is seriously ill are inscribed in dominant representations of caring as women's work. In the process of dealing with childhood cancer the familial status quo is disrupted. The result is to increase already existing inequities in divisions of both practical and emotional labour between women and men.