Studies of children with chronic illnesses report that adaptive coping strategies such as maintaining a hopeful attitude, social support and information seeking may affect psychological adjustment and help to buffer the negative psychological effects that a chronic illness may have. HIV-infected children not only have the added stress of living with debilitating and progressive symptoms in a disease that threatens their life spans, but their disease often stigmatizes them and causes them to be ostracized. The largest proportion of children with HIV disease acquired it perinatally, and therefore the mother is also infected. Thus it is expected that these families have at least two infected natural family members, causing multigenerational effect in terms of epidemiology, multiple separations and the death of close family members. As a result, children need to develop coping strategies in order to deal effectively with this disease.