Childhood Cancer Awareness Month: Supporting Children and Families

The month, and what it is for

September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Proclamation 10795, signed on 30 August 2024, marked it in the United States and stated plainly that cancer is the leading cause of death by disease for children in America.

That fact and the progress against it sit together, and both are worth understanding.

The numbers, honestly

The 2025 projection of 9,550 new cancer diagnoses among U.S. children from birth to 14 years, and about 1,050 deaths, comes from the American Cancer Society. NCI repeats it on its childhood cancers page.

Cancer death rates in that age group fell by 70 percent between 1970 and 2020. Cancer is still the leading cause of death from disease among children.

Both statements are true at once. The disease became far more survivable and remains the deadliest illness children face.

Which cancers, and why they differ

NCI reports that the most common cancers in children aged 0 to 14 are leukemias, brain and other central nervous system tumors, and lymphomas.

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, alone makes up about 25% of cancer diagnoses in children under 15. About 3,100 children and adolescents under 20 are diagnosed with it each year. Incidence peaks sharply between ages 1 and 4, at 76.3 cases per million per year, then falls to 23.8 per million by age 10.

Adult cancers are mostly carcinomas — cancers of the surfaces that line organs, shaped by decades of exposure and aging. Children's cancers usually are not. They arise in blood-forming tissue, in the nervous system, in muscle and bone. That difference is why the drugs, the doses, and the specialty are separate. Our overview of childhood cancer covers the main types.

Why prevention advice does not apply here

NCI is direct about this: the causes of most childhood cancers are not known.

About 8 to 10 percent of cancers in children are caused by an inherited mutation passed from a parent. The rest are not traceable to anything a family did or did not do.

NCI also explains why environmental causes have been so hard to pin down. Childhood cancers are rare, and exposures before birth and in early life are difficult to measure years after the fact.

There is no screening program for childhood cancer in the general population, and none of the lifestyle advice that lowers adult cancer risk applies to a five-year-old. Parents who go looking for what they missed will not find it, because in most cases there is nothing to find.

When to get checked

Childhood cancer symptoms overlap almost entirely with ordinary childhood illness. What separates them is persistence and combination.

For leukemia, NCI's patient summary lists what should prompt a doctor's visit: fever, easy bruising or bleeding, flat pinpoint dark-red spots under the skin, weakness or fatigue, pale skin, bone or joint pain, shortness of breath, painless swollen lymph nodes in the neck or armpit or groin, pain or fullness below the ribs, loss of appetite, weight loss, abdominal pain, and infections that keep coming back.

Practical thresholds help more than a list. A fever with no clear source lasting more than a week. Bruising in places a child does not normally bump. Limping or refusing to walk without an injury. Morning headaches with vomiting. A lump that does not shrink after two weeks. Any of those is worth an appointment and a blood count.

Nearly every child with these symptoms has something common and self-limiting. The point is that ruling it out costs one visit.

Where children are treated

NCI notes that pediatric oncology is its own specialty, and that hospitals with expertise in treating children with cancer are usually members of the Children's Oncology Group.

The Children's Oncology Group is NCI-supported and is the world's largest organization running clinical research in childhood cancer. At those centers, trials are available for most types of cancer that occur in children, and many patients are offered a place in one.

That matters because most progress in curing childhood cancers has come through trials rather than around them. NCI describes pediatric trials as generally designed to compare a potentially better therapy against the current standard. A trial in this setting is usually not a last resort. Our page on clinical trials for children explains how they are structured.

The part that lasts

Treatment ends. Its effects do not always end with it.

NCI describes late effects — health problems that appear months or years after treatment — as a particular concern in childhood cancer, because treating a growing body can leave lasting physical and emotional consequences. What appears depends on the cancer type, the child's age, and the treatment given.

Every survivor should have a treatment summary and a survivorship care plan. Specialized follow-up clinics exist for exactly this. The summary matters practically: a doctor twenty years from now needs to know which drugs and what radiation dose a person received as a child.

What to keep in perspective

A 70 percent fall in death rates is a genuine achievement and not a promise. It is a population figure across five decades and every cancer type, and outcomes still vary enormously between diagnoses.

An awareness month also does not shorten anyone's diagnosis. Nothing on a calendar changes what a symptom means.

What is actually actionable is narrower: know that pediatric expertise exists and is concentrated, ask whether a trial is open, and keep the treatment record for life.

Sources

• NCI: Childhood Cancers
• Proclamation 10795 of August 30, 2024 — National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, 2024 (govinfo)
• NCI PDQ: Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Treatment (Health Professional Version)
• NCI PDQ: Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Treatment (Patient Version)
• American Cancer Society: Cancer Facts & Statistics

How this article was prepared

An AI-assisted editorial system helped prepare this page. No named medical reviewer has reviewed it unless one is listed.

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