AIDS and Its Traumatic Effects on Families

Abstract

Hardly over, perhaps barely begun, the epic of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) involves multigenerational losses and redefinitions of individual, family, and community roles and responsibilities. An AIDS diagnosis dramatically alters the emotional climate of the family system. Coping takes many forms. Once-independent young adults go home to die in their parents' care. Grandparents and extended families take in orphaned children. The oldest child becomes the parental figure and primary caregiver. Children enter foster care or are placed for adoption. Siblings are separated to make it more likely that relatives will be able to house them. Older children live on their own, often in precarious situations without adult supervision. Whatever the individual solutions, they reflect a world out of balance, a profound upheaval in the natural order that takes as a given that grandparents ought not to have to assume parenting responsibilities for two consecutive generations, and that parents should not have to bury their children. This chapter describes the American experience, since that is the one the authors know intimately. Moreover, it focuses on families in which parents of children or adolescents have AIDS, and not on multigenerational traumas in families with gay men. [Text, pp. 587, 588]