Death Is Something That Is Extremely Challenging To Process

After interviewing the social workers Hope and Hodge (2006) found that they had observed similar patterns regarding the factors that affect the adjustment of children who lost a parent to death. Boys tend to show externalizing behaviors whereas girls tend to show internalizing behaviors due to the lost of a parent. They found that the cognitive level rather than the age of the child affects their adjustment more. Therefore younger children and preadolescents seem to have more difficulty adjusting to the death of a parent than adolescents. The results did not support earlier findings that sudden death present more difficulty adjusting than expected death. Most of the participants reported that sudden and expected death is equally traumatic to children. The participants also said that the adjustment of the caretaker is important for a positive adjustment for the children. The caretaker must be able to grieve while supporting the child’s need to grieve. This study shows that children of different ages and genders react different to the death of a parent.

“What has changed is our way of coping and dealing with death and dying and our dying patients.”(Kubler-Ross 109) In “On the Fear of Death” by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, she discusses the changes that have happened over the past few decades. The author believes that these changes are responsible for the increased fear of death, the rising number of emotional problems, and the greater need for understanding of and coping with the problems of death and dying. The author says, “The fact that the children are allowed to stay at home where a fatality has stricken and are in included in the talk, discussion, and fears give them the feeling that hey are not alone in the grief and give them the comfort of shared responsibility and shared mourning.” (Kubler-Ross 110) She believes that allowing the children to stay and be involved in the grieving stage prepares them gradually and

According to Pond (2012), the grief process in young people is dependent on both emotional and cognitive developmental levels of each child, as well as the environmental changes that might occur due to this loss. Pond (2013) explains that Freud was among the first to acknowledge the need for processing grief, which he saw as the path to regaining emotional equilibrium being possible only through disconnecting emotionally from the dead loved one. Upon further research, Bowlby changed this line of thinking; and with children, attachment with the dead loved one was adapted to change the type of relationship the child experiences with a consideration of the past, present, and future being different due to the death. Based on these findings, treatment protocols have been developed to assist children who are experiencing trouble processing grief.

The Two-Track Model of Bereavement is a model that states loss is conceptualized along two axes. Track I pertains to the biopsychosocial functioning in the event of a loss and Track II pertains to the bereaved’s continued emotional attachment and relationship to whoever is deceased. The effect of Track I is seen through the bereaved’s functioning, including their anxiety, their self-esteem and self-worth, and their depressive affect and cognitions. Noting the ability of one to invest in life tasks after experiencing a loss indicates how they are responding to the loss of the deceased. This Track is seen as an expression similar to one of trauma, or crisis. Track II holds that the bereaved has difficulty physically separating from the deceased. This can be seen in emotional, interpersonal, or cognitive ways. It is shown through imagery and memories that the bereaved experiences surrounding the deceased, whether positive or negative, as well as the emotional distance from them. These pictures in the bereaved’s head explain both the cognitive and emotional view of the person who has died (Rubin, 1999).

According to The Last Dance, a child gains all components of a mature concept of death between the ages of seven and ten. However, it is later noted that it is more reliable to take developmental sequence into consideration instead of age due to the fact that children develop at different rates. In order for a child to have a mature understanding of death, it is important for him or her to have experiences regarding

Someone who is grieving will experience “major psychological, spiritual, social and physiological” changes throughout the grieving process (Hooyman & Kramer, 2006, p37). There are many theories and models that support these words. This essay will discuss Freud’s theory of grief work (Davies, 2004), Bowlby’s attachment theory (Walsh, 2012), and Worden’s tasks of grief (Worden & Winokuer, 2011). The major tasks of grief throughout the four different stages of life will be looked at, as well as common grief reactions, and ways to support people through these. In addition how children, adolescents, adults and the elderly understand and respond to grief will be examined. Finally how people at the various stages of life confront their own death will be looked at, including some personal examples.

The loss of an adult child is devastating, just as is the death of a younger child. However, there are differences as to how both the parents react to such losses. In this case the paper focuses on the loss of an adult child and how the parent copes with the situation. The paper will give insight into the situation that precedes the demise of the child such as the trajectory of illnesses. A review on how the parents deal with the loss after it occurs will be discussed as well as the various issues the parent faces. The impact on the parent after the child’s loss will also feature. There will be a summary of the findings, then a section that will give the implications of the research and its importance to the field of psychology, and finally an as well as focusing on the bigger picture of loss with older parents who have lost their children.

Grief is the act following the loss of a loved one. While grief and bereavement are normal occurrences, the grief process is a social construct of how someone should behave. The acceptable ways that people grieve change because of this construct. For a time it was not acceptable to grieve; today, however, it is seen as a necessary way to move on from death (Scheid, 2011).The grief process has been described as a multistage event, with each stage lasting for a suggested amount of time to be considered “normal” and reach resolution. The beginning stage of grief is the immediate shock, disbelief, and denial lasting from hours to weeks (Wambach, 1985). The middle stage is the acute mourning phase that can include somatic and emotional turmoil. This stage includes acknowledging the event and processing it on various levels, both mentally and physically. The final stage is a period of

It is believed that children do not experience grief until one has been through adolescents and can distinguish thoughts and feeling from emotions. According to Glass (1991), a child can grasp the notion of death during early childhood; and can begin to grief as early as six months (Willis, 2002). Willis (2002) believes from a moderate perspective that children begin to understand death and grieve approximately at three to four years old. Many times, small children are affected by loss and their grief is often underestimated. Children between the ages of three to five years old fall into stage one. During stage one; children view death as a going away from one place to another. It is believed that the deceased person has just relocated and is living in a new location. Stage two consists of children between the ages of five to nine years of old. In this phase, death can be fixed. It is thought that if one

M. 1998. Coping with loss: Bereavement in adult life. Bmj, 316(7134), 856-859. Petersen, A. C., Compas, B. E., Brooks-Gunn, J., Stemmler, M., E, S., & Grant, K. E. 1993. Depression in adolescence.

Children who are grieving often struggle with life because they have lost a loved one. The loss may have been expected or unexpected, but the pain is still great. However, the way the person was lost and other factors surrounding the death, as well as the age of the child, can all affect how a counselor handles the child and his or her grief. Children can also grieve something other than a death, so there are many situations in which a child might need to see a grief counselor. Additionally, children who have been part of traumatic events where someone else has died may need more than just grief counseling because they will have survivor guilt and others issues which they will also have to face and work through. Empirical studies show that there are many different ways to provide a child with grief counseling, and that children can react very differently based on many characteristics. Counseling that is tailored to the child is the most significant way to help that child - and that is still not enough to convince every scholar that grief counseling actually has any benefit at all.

Young adults may also face many stressors and huge transitions during the grieving time (Servaty & Hayslip 2001). Factors such as gender of the grieving child, social support, coping skills, and more all influence the young adult and further the need for a psychosocial approach when helping this population. Mindfulness has been effectively shown to help treat depression but more research is needed to work with grief, particularly for parental grief with young adults (Cacciatore & Flint, 2012). The findings can be applied to grief work

This essay explores several models and theories that discuss the complexities of loss and grief. A discussion of the tasks, reactions and understanding of grief through the different stages from infants to the elderly, will also be attempted.

Participants of this study will be a sample of about 15 children that are attending a bereavement class at a local hospice. The children will between the ages of five and 15 years old. The participants must have lost a close relative or friend in the past year, and must be in one of the four stages of grief process per John Bowlby’s stages of the five grief process or be in one of the grief stages per Kubler Ross. The concept of complicated grief among adults was first raised by Bowlby (Vonk, Lee, & Bride, 2014). I will be comparing the children’s experience to the stages of John Bowlby or Kubler Ross and later compare it to that of adults that are in the same stages. The children will be recruited through bereavement classes offered through

Nader and Salloum (2011) made clear that, at different ages, children differ in their understanding of the universality, inevitability, unpredictability, irreversibility, and causality of death. They believed, despite the increasing understanding with age of the physical aspects of death, a child may simultaneously hold more than one idea about the characteristics of death. However, factors that complete the determining nature of childhood grieving across different age groups may be a difficult task for a number of reasons including their environment in means of the support they have available, the child’s nature in terms of their personality, genetics, and gender, coping skills and previous experiences, the developmental age, grieving style, whether or not therapy was received, and the relationship to the deceased (Nader & Salloum, 2011). Crenshaw (2005) found that according to our current understanding of childhood traumatic grief and normal grief, thoughts and images of a traumatic nature are so terrifying, horrific, and anxiety provoking that they cause the child to avoid and shut out these thoughts and images that would be comforting reminders of the person who died. The distressing and intrusive images, reminders, and thoughts of the traumatic circumstances of the death, along with the physiological hyper-arousal associated with such re-experiencing, prevent the child from proceeding in a healthy way with the grieving process (Crenshaw, 2005). McClatchy, Vonk, and