How to Talk to Children About MS

It’s natural to want to protect your children from worrying about you. Yet you don’t want to withhold the truth from them, either.

What to do?

First of all, consider this: children are incredibly intuitive and sensitive to changes in their environment. They probably will have figured out that there’s something going on with you, even before you tell them.

The good news is, they’re also incredibly resilient and can cope with almost any event, especially when they’re informed and included in the process. If your children are old enough to talk, they’re old enough to talk about your MS. Even kids as young as four or five years old can be told in a way that won’t be scary or threatening. It’s usually best to be open and honest with them.

Try to be positive, calm, and confident when you tell them. A good attitude could make all the difference in how well your children respond. They’ll want to know that you will be doing everything you can to take care of yourself and of them.

They might actually be relieved when you talk about this together; children’s fantasies are often worse than the reality. Interviews with children whose parents have MS have shown that kids in this situation actually cope with it more comfortably than their parents do.

Your children may have some questions about your MS. Answer them honestly, in an age-appropriate way. They may also harbor secret fears that they won’t necessarily bring up with you, such as whether they’re responsible for your having MS. You might want to be proactive and emphasize that this has nothing to do with them or anything that they—or anyone else—has or hasn’t done.