Parents and Cancer: Helping Children and Teens Cope

Cancer is not easy for anyone to understand and yet children and teens have an additional difficulty due to the way they think. People do not learn abstract thinking until 12-15 years old or later. What does this really mean? It means that without abstract thinking younger people think everything is black or white, good or bad. We see a bright, articulate young person and believe they think like an adult when really they see situations as two sided instead of multi-faceted.