Maintaining everyday life in a family with a dying parent: Teenagers' experiences of adapting to responsibility.

Teenagers are living through a turbulent period in their development, when they are breaking away from the family to form their own identities, and so they are particularly vulnerable to the stressful situation of having a parent affected by a progessive and incurable illness. The current study sought to gain more knowledge about the ways that teenagers themselves describe living in a family with a seriously ill and dying parent. More specifically, the aims were to describe how teenagers are emotionally affected by everyday life in a family with a dying parent and to determine how they attempt to adapt to this situation.