Background: Growing up during adolescence means, among other things, moving through life with one’s peer group. A cancer diagnosis has the potential to disrupt this normal social process.
Aim: The Growing Up With Cancer project aimed to describe the impact of cancer illness and treatment on the process of growing up. This paper has two aims. One is to describe the impact of missing out on rites of passage on young people’s relationships with their peers. The other is to discuss how health professionals can support young people’s peer relationships.
Method: We conducted forty-nine interviews with 27 young people aged 16-29 years (diagnosed between 10 and 22 years). Participants were chosen using quota sampling. We analysed interview data from a symbolic interactionist perspective.
Findings: Participants missed out on both the accrual of day to day experiences and the rites of passage they would normally have shared with their peers because of their cancer treatment.
They managed this in two ways. First, they tried to recapture the day to day experiences they had missed out on during their cancer illness and treatment. However, the day to day experiences cannot be recaptured. Participants had a set of day to day experiences that shaped their own process of growing up.
Second, some participants attended social events that marked different rites of passage, but their experience of those events was unsatisfying because they did not share them with their peers.
Conclusion: “Missing out” denies young people access to the experiences that form the “currency” of social interactions in later life. Some topics of conversation and the memories and feelings they evoke are therefore unavailable to young cancer survivors. Every effort should therefore be made to facilitate the patient’s attendance at social events whether the events themselves seem important or not.