Patterns of maternal distress among children with cancer and their association with child emotional and somatic distress

OBJECTIVE: To identify patterns of distress among mothers of children with cancer over the initial 6 months of treatment and to examine these patterns as predictors of child somatic and emotional distress. METHOD: Data were gathered regarding maternal perceived stress and affective distress from mothers of children (N = 65, mean age = 8.3 years) with cancer at 2 to 5 weeks postdiagnosis, then at 12 to 14 weeks and 22 to 24 weeks. Mothers and nurses provided indexes of child somatic and emotional distress at these assessments. RESULTS: Hierarchical and k-means cluster analyses revealed four distinct patterns of maternal distress: high, moderate, declining, and low. The high maternal distress group reported higher child emotional distress at all three points but higher child somatic distress only at the final assessment. Maternal distress group was unrelated to nurse-reported child distress. CONCLUSIONS: The identification of four empirically derived patterns of maternal distress may explain some of the variance in the literature regarding parental distress vis-à-vis pediatric cancer treatment and may have relevance to intervention efforts. Differences in the relations between maternal distress groups and mother- and nurse-reported child distress underscore the importance of collecting child distress data from multiple sources.