Tucked away in a meeting room in the back of the Abingdon YMCA, a group of children sat around a table, chatting and eating a quick dinner of chicken fingers, vegetables, fruit and a cookie for dessert.
When the plates were cleared, the children directed their attention to the front of the room.
"Why are we here today?" asked Patsy Astarita, a clinical oncology social worker.
"Because one of our people in our family has cancer," answered Ned Maxwell of Hickory. "And we want to learn more about what cancer is."
Ned was one of seven children, ages 6 to 15, who attended a session of CLIMB (Children's Lives Include Moments of Bravery), an initiative created by the Children's Treehouse Foundation, a psychosocial intervention program, to help children learn about and cope with cancer.
CLIMB was started because there was a lack of such programs to help children cope with a parent's cancer, said Peter van Dernoot, founder and chairman of the Denver-based foundation.
About 315,000 adults ages 25 to 54, will be diagnosed this year with an invasive cancer, and they have about 592,000 children, said van Dernoot, who created CLIMB in 2001.
Learning that a parent has cancer is staggering for these children, he said.
"These children need help," he said. "There is considerable evidence that shows that if these children don't receive ongoing emotional support, they will develop maladaptive behavior."
He also wants to dispel children's perceptions of cancer, he said.
"What gets to me is when a child comes to me and asks, `Is it my fault that Mommy has cancer? Did she get it because I was so bad?' Or they ask, `Can I catch cancer?'" van Dernoot said.
There are about 1,400 cancer hospitals In the United States, but only 50 to 60 emotional support programs for children, he said. More than 20 hospitals around the country offer the CLIMB program.
CLIMB is offered several times a year and is divided into six two-hour sessions that are designed to teach children about cancer and help them identify and express their feelings about it.
The format of each session includes dinner, a welcome and a warm-up activity during which the children use a letter to illustrate their feelings; a discussion about a feeling of the day, such as mad, confused or sad; a content activity such as an art project or a therapeutic play; and a closing activity in which the children talk about their feelings and what they learned in the session.
