🏗️🚧👷‍♀️More resources like tools, scripts, and tips in video, PDF, and slideshow format coming soon! Stay tuned.

Two of my favorite foundations for families are:

Fruitfly Collective A team of experts who are either living with cancer or providing cancer care or parenting support. The website is full of fantastic resources including handouts, classes, and a wonderful online shop.

Wonders & Worries A nonprofit that provides free, professional support for children and teenagers living through a parent’s serious illness or injury. The website has great articles and videos on child development, how to talk about an illness, family stories, and more.

I also love the podcast MeSsy with Christina Applegate & Jamie-Lynn Sigler. The hosts get vulnerable about their lives with multiple sclerosis and talk with each other, friends, co-stars, and the people who keep them going through the messiness of life.  

And here are 20 of my favorite books

BOOKS FOR PARENTS WITH A CHRONIC CONDITION

1. Raising an Emotionally Health Child When a Parent is Sick by Paula Rauch and Anna Muriel. These authors ran a program at Massachusetts General Hospital to teach parents how to address their children’s concerns when they are seriously ill, ensure their child’s financial and emotional security, and reassure them they will be taken care of.

2. How to Help Children Through a Parent’s Serious Illness: Supportive, Practical Advice from a Leading Child Life Specialist by Kathleen McCue and Ron Bonn. Kathleen runs the Child Life Program at the Cleveland Clinic and wrote this book to help parents talk to their children about their illness, hereditary diseases, and how to handle it when their disease won’t get better or might get worse.

 BOOKS FOR CHILDREN OF PARENTS WITH A CHRONIC CONDITION

1. Feel Better, Mommy by Risa Kirschner. Follow Abby’s adventures as she visits her mom in the hospital and finds a magical bed that moves and takes her teddy on a wheelchair ride. Based on the real experiences of the author’s then two-year-old daughter, this story teaches children that hospitals are safe places for healing and that parents always love them, even if they have to spend time away from home.

2. Big Tree is Sick by Nathalie Slosse and Rocio Del Moral. This beautifully illustrated storybook describes the anger and emotion that many children encounter when a close relative or friend is diagnosed with a long-term illness. The story of Big Tree depicts how things are often out of your control and sets out effective strategies for dealing with these emotions.

3. When Pete’s Dad Got Sick by Kathleen Long Bostrom and Cheri Bladholm. Pete is a boy whose dad used to run and swing him around, but now can hardly walk, much less play. Pete is hurt and angry and doesn’t understand why this has happened. Pete’s dad tells him that even though he can no longer run, he can still be his dad.

4. My Parent Has Cancer and It Really Sucks by Marc and Maya Silver. One million American teenagers live with a parent who is fighting cancer. It’s a hard blow for those already navigating high school, preparing for college, and becoming increasingly independent. Maya was 15 when her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She and her dad, Marc, have combined their family’s personal experience with advice from dozens of medical professionals and real stories from 100 teens―all going through the same thing Maya did.

5. How Do You Care for a Very Sick Bear? by Vanessa Bayer and Rosie Butcher. When the Saturday Night Live star was young, she had childhood leukemia and experienced firsthand that when someone close to us is dealing with illness, it’s difficult to know what to do or say. In her first children’s book, she offers gentle, reassuring advice for readers of all ages.

6. The Invisible String by Patrice Karst and Joanne Lew-Vriethoff. In this relatable and reassuring story, a mother tells her two children that they’re all connected by an invisible string. “That’s impossible!” the children insist, but still they want to know more: “What kind of string?” The answer is the simple truth that binds us all: An Invisible String made of love. Even though you can’t see it with your eyes, you can feel it deep in your heart, and know that you are always connected to the ones you love. 

BOOKS ON PARENTING

1. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Philippa Perry. This is hands down my favorite book on parenting. It has wise, witty advice on parenting children of all ages from newborns to adults. It is the book I give to all my friends who become new parents.

2. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. There is a reason this book has sold more than 3 million copies! It is filled with sage insight on how to help your child cope with negative feelings, promote self-discipline, and resolve family conflicts peacefully.

3. Raising Cooperative Kids by Gerald Patterson and Marion Forgatch. I love the premise of this book, which is that the most important trait for a child to succeed at school, in sports and other activities, and at home is to be cooperative. The authors lay out techniques they’ve developed over 40 years of working with families. We’ve implemented many in our home and will keep adding new ones as our son gets older.

4. The Whole Brain Child by Daniel Siegel and Tinay Payne Bryson. The main idea of this book is that, until children are in their mid-twenties, their right brain and its emotions tend to wrest control from the more logical left brain. Helping integrate your child’s whole brain can be key to stopping tantrums, sulking, and sibling squabbling.

5. Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. Based on years of their own experience as moms plus feedback they got during hundreds of workshops, the authors developed this book filled with tips on when and how to intervene in fights, how to reduce competition, and how to help children develop a special relationship.

6. Raising Good Humans by Hunter Clarke-Fields and Carla Naumburg. One of the hardest parts of parenting is breaking out of our automatic reactions which are often unhelpful and short-sighted. This book helps you develop more mindful ways of reacting to and listening to your children to not only parent better but to raise kinder, more thoughtful children.

BOOKS ON LIVING WITH A CHRONIC CONDITION

1. How To Be Sick by Toni Bernhard. It’s hard to say how many times I’ve reread this book. Eight? Nine? It is by far the most helpful book I’ve found to help me cope with being sick all the time. After the author got ill quite suddenly (and never got better), she wrote this Buddhist-inspired guide to help readers realize our inner freedom is limitless regardless of our circumstances.

2. The Invisible Kingdom by Meghan O’Rourke. This complex, lyrical examination of the rise of chronic illness and how woefully unprepared our health system is to handle it dovetails with the author’s own difficulties getting properly diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease, POTS, thyroiditis, and Ehlers-Danlos.

3. The Chronic Illness Workbook by Patricia Fennell. This book has one of the most helpful models I’ve found for understanding chronic illness which is to see it as a constantly recurring cycle of 1) crisis 2) stabilization 3) resolution 4) integration. The workbook is filled with helpful exercises that help make order out of the chaotic day-to-day reality of having a chronic condition.

4. Healing Your Chronic Illness Grief by Alan D.W. and Jaimie A. Wolfelt. One of a series of many books on grief, this book helps readers cope with the losses they experience as part of having a chronic illness including physical limitations, financial struggles, and relationship challenges. There are 100 tips, affirmations, and activities to help you, as the authors say, mourn well in order to live well.

5. Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag. One of the most influential books on illness ever written, Sontag wrote this when she was a cancer patient and frustrated by all of the taboos and angst that came along with getting a cancer diagnosis. A decade later, she updated it when the AIDS epidemic hit. This book continues to have an enormous influence on medical professionals and patients alike.

6. Disability Visibility by Alice Wong. Written by a disability rights activist, this anthology gives us a rich look at the disabled experience which is one of the most underrepresented in popular culture.