- Knowledgebase: Behavioral, Developmental, and Emotional Problems
- Questions about behavioral and emotional problems, Autism, developmental delays.
- 20. Dealing with Grief, Death, and Loss - Top
- There are questions in life parents hope they will never have to deal with: How do I explain to my child that mom or dad is terminally ill? And will the death leave psychological scars because they don't know how to grieve and I don't know how to help them? As reported in The New York Times, a new book about a study at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center offers new evidence on children's ability to come to terms with the death of a parent. In Healing Children's Grief:
Surviving a parent's Death From Cancer Dr. Grace Hyslop Christ, an associate professor in the School of Social Work at Columbia University, makes it clear that children, even very young children, do grieve, but their grieving differs at different ages and often bears little resemblance to the mourning of adults. Unlike Freud's long-accepted view that grief is an emotion too difficult for a child to resolve, Dr. Christ found that with proper support and assistance most of the children in the study were able to move on in their lives without many long-term psychological problems.
Over the past decade, investigators have begun to gain a greater understanding that losing a parent is not a single event, which then has predictable consequences for the child. Rather, the way a child responds to the loss is a complex weaving of circumstances, factoring in the emotional health of the surviving parent, if there are outside stresses, like financial problems, as well as the personality of the child. Here are the results of the Sloan-Kettering study:
Dr. Christ and her partner, Dr. Karolynn Siegel, followed 157 children, ages 3 to 17, through their parent's illness and for 14 months after the death. They interviewed both parents and children and offered parents suggestions of ways to handle problems with children if they emerged. Most of the children who took part in this study did well. Of the 139 children above preschool age 84 had returned to normal levels of functioning by 8 to 14 months after the parent's death. Another 32 were functioning normally in all but one area, and the remaining 23 children showed no signs of improvement or had developed new psychological symptoms since the parent's death. The most interesting finding was that kids seemed to react differently depending on their ages.
Preschoolers from 3 to 5 had the most difficulty understanding the irreversibility of death. Even when they had been told ahead of time that their parent was going to die, they would repeatedly ask (sometimes for months) when their parent was coming back. In addition, they needed concrete explanations of what death meant; for example, that the body no longer functioned and that death made people feel sad and cry. Once the children accepted that the parent would not return, they often experienced night terrors, bedwetting, whining, stomachaches and intense anxiety when separated from the surviving parent. They were upset when the surviving parent showed strong emotions, and soon after the death, many began to demand that their lost mother or father be replaced.
Slightly older children from 6 to 8 were generally quick to appreciate the permanence of death, but were also likely to conclude that they were responsible for it. Many children talked about wanting to dies o they could be with the lost parent. Such statements, says Dr. Christ, were usually expressions of grief and longing rather than suicidal feelings. At the same time, the children loved to talk about the deceased parent and tell stories about the things that the family had done together.
For children of 9 to 14 the process of mourning was more complex. Feeling overwhelmed by their feelings, many children were reluctant to talk. They missed the parent but hated the prospect of showing emotion. Dr. Christ says, "The mantra of this age group was 'I cry, but in my room alone.'"
It was the oldest in the study, from ages 15 to 17 that grieved the most like adults. Many went through a sustained period of mourning immediately after the death. They were able to be helpful to surviving parents so much that sometimes the parent forgot that the child was still a child.
For all age groups, the researchers found, children who adjusted most had parents who were communicative and shared information about what was going on. Children in families where the parents refused to deal with the death or where the loss was compounded by other problems (like the surviving parent falling into a deep depression) had more trouble coping. In many cases children in the study reported more stress and anxiety in the period before the parent died than afterward.
Dr. Christ says that one of the most interesting findings of the study was that some parents who had serious psychological difficulties before a spouse died managed to pull themselves together and prove very effective in parenting their children after the death. And while many dying parents worried that their children would remember them in the worst stages of their illness, the study found that more often the opposite was true. Children really focused on the positive aspects of the parent and they often worked to construct an image of the parent they could remember and take with them into their later lives.
The bottom line is this: with a good support system in place a death in the family does not have to be a tragedy compounded. Even with only one parent, kids of all ages can survive and thrive.
- Updated: March 8, 2001
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