Journal of Health Psychology 16(8) 1259–1267 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1359105311405872 hpq.sagepub.com Introduction Exposure to stressful and traumatic events can have severe psychological consequences. However, there is a growing body of evidence of positive psychological changes as a result of people’s struggle with such events (Joseph and Linley, 2008). This phenomenon has been described in individuals traumatized after disas- ter, war or other forms of adversity, as well as in bereaved parents (Engelkemeyer and Marwit, 2008), parents of critically ill children (Colville and Cream, 2009) or parents of children with a serious chronic disease, such as cancer (Barakat et al., 2006). The positive changes can evolve in the absence of posttraumatic stress or they can coexist beside or in spite of it (Folkman, 2008; Zoellner et al., 2008). They do not only imply recovery after a trauma but also individual development in the sense of personal growth (Zoellner and Maercker, 2006). The research in this area has usually conceptualized the growth processes based on the work of Tedeschi and Calhoun (1996) who introduced the term post- traumatic growth (PTG). According to their Posttraumatic growth in mothers and fathers of children with severe illnesses Ines Hungerbuehler 1 , Margarete E Vollrath 2 , Markus A Landolt 1,3 Abstract Posttraumatic growth (PTG) can occur after various types of trauma but has not been studied prospectively in parents of children with chronic diseases. In this study, PTG was assessed in 126 parents of 67 children with type 1 diabetes or cancer three years after diagnosis. Most parents (62.7%) reported at least a moderate degree of PTG. Quality of family relationships, parental psychological distress and child medical characteristics assessed one month after diagnosis, and parents’ gender, explained 34 percent of PTG variance. The findings confirm that a severe disease of a child can lead to personal growth in the child’s parents. Keywords chronic illness, chronic disease, parents, posttraumatic growth 1 University Children’s Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland 2 Division of Mental Health, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway 3 Children’s Research Center, University Children’s Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Corresponding author: Dr. Markus A Landolt, Department of Psychosomatics and Psychiatry, University Children’s Hospital Zurich, Steinwiesstrasse 75, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland. Email: markus.landolt@kispi.uzh.ch. 405872HPQ XX X 10.1177/1359105311405872Hungerbuehler et al.Journal of Health Psychology Article