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How to help family and friends provide meaningful support

When your extended family and community learn of your child’s diagnosis, they often have good intentions when they offer to help, however it can be difficult to receive support that is actually helpful and long lasting.

Many families tell us how overwhelming, devastating and stressful it is to face childhood cancer. While organising help from family and friends can seem like the last thing on your mind, bringing together a group of people to help you can have a huge impact on your own and your family’s lives.

Below, we’ve shared some stories from families on the kinds of help they received, what was helpful and unhelpful, advice they’d give to extended family and community members, and tools on how to help you organise and receive more meaningful help from others.

Below we share more insights from mum Laura, who featured in the above video. Her daughter Carys was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2020. She shares how she was able to receive meaningful support from her loved ones throughout her daughter’s cancer experience by using KiteCrew technology.

Laura and Carys’ story: Receiving the wrong kind of help

In April 2020, Laura’s seven-year-old daughter Carys was diagnosed with leukaemia. Naturally, when hearing the news, Laura’s friends and family wanted to help.

Unfortunately, the kind of help Laura received only added more worry and emotional overwhelm on top of an already stressful cancer diagnosis.

Every day, Laura would come home from the hospital to:

meals on her doorstep that had gone off because no one was home to receive them,
boxes full of toys that Carys was too sick to play with and,
vouchers for restaurants the family was in no state to use and felt guilty wasting.

Two years later, looking back, the main feeling I had around that time other than dealing with my daughter’s cancer diagnosis was the guilt. I had over twelve storage boxes of toys in our garage that were never going to be used properly.

Laura

Although our family, friends and community mean well, it can be hard for them to understand what a family facing childhood cancer is going through and how best to support them.

What Laura really needed, was help with the day-to-day tasks of running the family home so she could focus on her daughter’s cancer treatment.

Like most families facing childhood cancer, Laura didn’t have the time or mental capacity to explain her needs to all the different people in her life who were trying to help her.

Thankfully, a friend recommended the KiteCrew technology and Laura quickly saw the benefits.

How KiteCrew can help

KiteCrew is Redkite’s free cancer support app that allows families to upload all the tasks they need help with in one place and for friends and family to accept the tasks. KiteCrew also has a group messaging feature to keep everyone updated and a resource section full of tips and educational content.

By leaning on KiteCrew, Laura was able to let her support network know exactly what she needed when she needed it, reducing the workload and allowing her to focus solely on the care of her daughter.

How KiteCrew helped:

Using the app, Laura was able to easily coordinate a support network of over 140 people who wanted to help her family. All in one place.
Laura created tasks in the app that were passed on to her network. This included mowing the lawn, dropping meals off at specific times, and receiving grocery items they needed.
The app removed the guesswork for those who wanted to help but didn’t know how.
The app removed the stress, guilt, and overwhelm of responding to everyone individually.
The app made it easy for Laura to ask for the help her family needed, coordinate helpers to complete tasks, share updates and stay connected with family and friends.

It was a key part of getting through that year. It satisfied everybody involved. It satisfied the people who wanted to help. It satisfied our family by having more control over how they helped when they helped, and to what extent they helped.

Download KiteCrew now for iPhone or Android

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