Nobody hands you a roadmap when a parent gets diagnosed with cancer. And nobody tells you there's a free, magic-filled summer camp waiting for your kids.

In this episode of Let Me Know If You Need A Podcast, Amy Steinhour and Kristen Beck sit down with Ashley Borniger, Camp Kesem advisory board member, camp parent, and triple-negative breast cancer survivor, to talk about what it actually looks like to parent through a cancer diagnosis, and what happens when your kids finally get a space that's entirely their own.

Ashley shares the full story: diagnosed at 40, two kids in kindergarten and fourth grade, four months into a new city, and a daughter old enough to Google her oncologist's credentials before Ashley had even processed the news herself. She didn't find Camp Kesem through a resource list. She found it while hooked up to chemo, laptop open, because her mom heard about it on the radio.

Meet the Expert

Ashley Borniger is a triple-negative breast cancer survivor, Camp Kesem advisory board member, and mom of two. Diagnosed at 40 while navigating a cross-country move and two young kids, she found Camp Kesem by accident, mid-chemo, and has since become an advocate for the organization and for the kids it was built to support. Her perspective brings together the lived experience of parenting through treatment and the ongoing work of helping other families find the same resource she almost missed.

The Big Idea

When people think about cancer support, they usually think about the patient. Ashley's story makes the case for a group that gets overlooked just as often: the kids watching it happen.

That reality shows up as:

• Kids who process a parent's diagnosis in wildly different ways, even within the same family
• A free, national camp network most newly diagnosed parents have never heard of
• A daughter who needed control and information, not protection from it
• A son who, years later, realized he'd wanted to be let in more than he was
• A parent who kept performing "fine" long after she'd stopped feeling it

The opportunity here is kids' own space to process: recognizing that children need somewhere to put down what they're carrying, separate from managing their parent's illness alongside them.

Key Takeaways

• There's no single right way for a kid to react. Ashley's daughter needed to research everything. Her son needed more information than he was given, and didn't realize it until years later.
• Camp Kesem is free, and most families don't know it exists. It's a national network of university-affiliated, counselor-run sleepaway camps exclusively for kids whose parents have been affected by cancer.
• Protecting kids from information isn't the same as protecting them from fear. Ashley's son wished he'd been told more, not less.
• Asking for help is hard even when you know better. Ashley, a doer who didn't like giving up control, was still cleaning her own house on weekends during chemo before she let herself hire help.
• Within 24 hours of reaching out, someone from Kesem responded and offered to take her family out for ice cream. Sometimes the system works exactly the way it should.

Tools, Strategies, or Frameworks Mentioned

• The Kesem Model: A national network of university-affiliated, counselor-run sleepaway camps exclusively for kids whose parents have been affected by cancer, free for every family who qualifies.
• Empowerment Night: A mid-camp circle where campers can voluntarily share their own cancer experiences with peers who understand it firsthand.
• Asking as Agency: Ashley's own turning point, hiring a cleaner once a month, as a real-life example of what it looks like to ask for help without treating it as failure.

Final Thoughts

The most powerful reframe isn't "kids are resilient, they'll be fine."

It's this:

Kids carry more than we realize, and they deserve their own space to put it down.

If you know a family navigating a cancer diagnosis, consider this your reminder that help, like Camp Kesem, might already exist and just needs to be found. And if you're the parent trying to hold it all together, consider this your permission slip to ask for the help you actually need, even if it's just a cleaner once a month.

"Just allowing yourself that space to say it's okay that you can't do it all is super important." — Ashley Borniger

🎧 Listen to the full episode: https://youtu.be/4eVBxHV3ymA

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