Pediatric Cancer
Every day, about 41 children and teenagers in the United States are told they have cancer.
It almost always starts with something small. A bruise that will not fade. A fever that keeps coming back. A limp, a headache, a tiredness that sleep does not fix. A parent takes their child in expecting to be told they are worrying over nothing.
Then a doctor says the word, and life splits cleanly into before and after.
The first days
Nearly 15,000 children and adolescents are diagnosed with cancer in the United States every year. It remains the leading cause of death by disease among American children past infancy.
For the family, the world shrinks to the size of a hospital room. One parent moves in beside the bed. The other tries to hold the rest of the family together: the siblings who suddenly get less of everything, the job that still expects them at 8 a.m., the house that still needs paying for. Parents learn a new vocabulary in a week. They learn to read a blood count. They learn to sleep in a chair.
The part no one sees
Families brace for medical bills. What blindsides them is everything else.
A national registry study of families across 48 states found that 92 percent of the financial burden of childhood cancer comes from non-medical costs — and that 62 percent of that distress is housing: the mortgage and the rent. Not chemotherapy. The roof.
The reason is simple. Somebody has to be at the bedside, and that somebody usually stops working. Families who go through this lose an average of 40 percent of their household income. The paychecks stop. The mortgage does not. Neither does the electric bill, or the car payment that gets them to the hospital 90 minutes away.
So parents start making impossible choices. Skip a payment or skip a visit. Keep the lights on or stay at the bedside. Nobody should have to decide between those two things, and no parent facing the worst week of their life should have to decide it alone.
The fight does not end when treatment does
There is real, hard-won good news. Five-year survival for childhood cancer has climbed from 63 percent in the mid-1970s to 87 percent today. More children are ringing the bell and going home than at any point in history.
But going home is not the end of it. About two out of three childhood cancer survivors go on to develop long-term health conditions — heart failure, hearing loss, second cancers — that need monitoring and treatment for the rest of their lives. A child diagnosed at seven can face 60 or 70 years of medical and financial consequences. Pediatric cancer is not a shorter version of adult cancer. Its bill comes due for a lifetime.
Where Still Strong comes in
We cannot cure a child’s cancer. What we can do is make sure a family does not lose their home while they fight it.
The Still Strong Foundation pays the bills that have nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with survival — mortgages, rent, utilities, the ordinary costs of keeping a household standing while a parent sits beside a hospital bed. The research says those costs are 92 percent of the burden. We think that is exactly where help belongs.
We want families to spend less time worrying about the mortgage and more time supporting their child through a victorious fight against cancer.
Your support keeps a family in their home while their child fights for their life. Every dollar goes to a real household with a real child in a real hospital bed.
Sources: American Cancer Society, Cancer Statistics 2026; National Cancer Institute, Cancer in Children and Adolescents; Family Reach Foundation national registry analysis reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology; Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation.
