Report shows how children cope with parent’s death
Report shows how children cope with parent’s death
Contrary to common views, children are neither irrevocably damaged, nor resilient and able to bounce back on their own from the death of a parent without the help of informed and supportive adults, according to Columbia University professor Grace Christ, a childhood bereavement expert and author of Healing Children’s Grief.
Her book was based on a Columbia University study of childhood bereavement, which dispels many common myths about how children cope with the death of a parent and outlines how, at different levels of development, children experience and express grief.
Largest study to date
Christ’s research studied data gathered from 1988 to 1994 of 157 children whose parents were cancer patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. For six months before and 14 months after the deaths of their parents, the children, ages 3 to 17, and their families received counseling and therapeutic intervention with social workers and other mental health professionals. Christ’s study was the largest intervention study of childhood bereavement to date. Previous studies only evaluated children after their parent died, often years later, and none during the period of illness that led to death.
Christ, a faculty member at the Columbia University School of Social Work, evaluated the 157 children and based their responses to the death of a parent on similar levels of cognitive, social, and emotional development.
"What was most surprising were the distinct differences we found in terms of how children at different developmental levels felt, experienced, and expressed their grief," Christ said. "I felt we needed to understand how children experienced the death of a parent in a much more systematic way to see if we could give better answers to what is typical, what is normative for children at different developmental levels — and in order to help the children effectively."
Toddlers to teens
When a surviving parent fails to understand the ways children experience grief, the result for both parent and child may be heightened fear, confusion, and helplessness, says Christ.
The study found:
• 3 to 5-year-olds cannot anticipate the loss of a parent, and do not immediately understand that the parent will never return. Once they do, they want to see the family restored through, for example, quick remarriage by the surviving parent.
• 6 to 8-year-olds put together cause and effect that do not belong together — a process known as magical thinking — that can result in erroneous beliefs, like a 7-year-old girl who thought she had killed her mother because she prayed for an end to her pain the night before she died.
• 9 to 11-year-olds, who are beginning to master the world through facts and information, need to know as much as they can about the illness or death as a way to bring more control to the experience. Without those facts, they can become overwhelmed by feelings they are unable to express.
• Children ages 12 to 14 — beginning to separate from their parents, become more independent, and develop a sense of their own identity — can become enraged and very frightened when they realize a parent is dying. Their normal intense focus on themselves at this age can become exaggerated to the point of harshly excluding others’ feelings.
• 15 to 17-year-olds begin to describe the intense sense of loss and emptiness that adults feel after the death of a spouse. The grief experienced by older teenagers is similar to the adult experience, but does not last as long.
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