In the fifteen years since it was published, How To Help Children Through a Parent's Serious Illness has become the standard work on the subject. It offers supportive, practical advice, including what to tell children about their parent's illness, how to recognize early-warning signs in a child's drawings, sleep patterns, school work and eating habits, and when and where to get professional help. But those fifteen years have brought new developments that will be explored in this greatly expanded new edition, including the dangers and opportunities of the Internet, a deep new understanding of hereditary diseases, the impact of the explosive growth in single-parent families, and new insights into how family trauma and mental illness may affect children.