, negative emotional reactions and poor quality of life when compared to norms or control groups ([@B1]; [@B27]).

It should be noted, however, that the research literature on the individual adjustment of children diagnosed with cancer and their family members documents a considerable variability in outcomes: while most show resiliency, some report adjustment problems after diagnosis. This idea of variability in adjustment to stressors is a key principle of the so-called ABCX-model ([@B19]; [Figure 1](#F1){ref-type="fig"}), one of the major family-stress models ([@B55]). This model assumes that a stressor ("a") interacts with the family members' crisis-meeting resources ("b") and the appraisal ("c") family members make of the stressful event, and that this interaction produces the amount of crisis or maladjustment ("x") in each family member ([@B55]). In other words, how an individual (the ill child and his/her family members) responds to or deals with childhood cancer is the result of an interaction between his/her available resources and his/her perception of the illness: the more resources and the more one perceives the illness as manageable instead of uncontrollable, the better the individual adjustment. Resources can be interpreted as factors that, by their presence, keep the individual from crisis or, by their absence, urges a family member into crisis. Resources can be situated at three levels: the individual level (e.g., personality; [@B11]), the family level (e.g., family functioning; [@B48]) and the contextual level (e.g., network support; [@B9]).

![ABCX model ([@B19]).](fpsyg-10-01405-g001){#F1}

Existing research on the individual adjustment of children diagnosed with cancer and their family members is limited in three ways. First, most research is a-theoretical (i.e., not based on a theoretical framework; [@B49]), so the selection of the variables within studies (type and their role) and the interpretation of the results is rather arbitrary. Second, up till now, most of the research that tried to ex