"Will You Still Feel Beautiful When You Find Out You Are Different?": Parents' Experiences, Reflections, and Appearance-Focused Conversations About Their Child's Visible Difference.

ABSTRACT: To investigate parents' reflections and experiences of having a child born with an appearance-altering condition, interviews with 33 parents of children born with rare craniofacial conditions were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Three themes emerged: "Managing emotions: A dynamic process," "Through another lens: External reminders of difference," and "Awareness of difference: Approaching the child." Findings suggest that although parents learned to accept and love their child's visible difference, external factors such as appearance-altering surgery and other people's reactions activated difficult emotions in parents. Parents struggled to decipher whether and when to raise appearance-related issues with their child, and how this could be done without distressing the child. Anti

SUBMITTER: Feragen KJB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8739583 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature