Why families matter

Serious illness puts pressure not only on individual family members but also on the family itself. The care of an acutely ill child requires the family to channel many of its resources toward a single member--an arrangement that can usually be sustained for a while but that cannot continue indefinitely while the other members do without. Illness disrupts ordinary familial functions and, if it is serious enough, threatens to break the family altogether. In this article, I argue that there are situations in which the threat to family integrity is so real and serious that the interests of parents or siblings or sometimes grandparents may override the interests of the pediatric patient.