ABSTRACT
Parenting is a complex, challenging, and rewarding task. This is particularly true for parents of children with a chronic health condition. For many chronic health conditions, the diagnosis of the condition places tremendous emotional, financial, and physical demands on parents, requiring substantial adaptation to the “new normal.” Although collaborations between pediatricians and psychologists date back to the late 1890s, the field of pediatric psychology did not actually emerge until the late 1960s, when Logan Wright, in his seminal American Psychologist article, first coined the term “pediatric psychologist” to describe psychologists who primarily work with children with health conditions in nonpsychiatric medical settings. A wide range of issues has been addressed in research on parenting children with chronic health conditions. The issues considered are those that have been examined most extensively in the research literature. A variety of theoretical approaches has been applied to understanding some of the challenges of rearing a child with a chronic health condition.
