Parental Grief Essay

The purpose of this study is to review literature related to the effects of parental death on children. Children who experience the death of a parent is considered an at risk population for psychological, behavioral, and social problems. There are many factors relating to the way children adjust to parental death. Some of these factors include the age of the child,

People deal with grief in different ways. As a small child, the way the narrator handles uncertainty and pain is distressing, yet also expected. She finds distractions in the furniture and decorations. The child notices a

A unique experience that I had at Norton Women’s and Children’s Hospital was that we also covered labor and delivery and the mother-baby unit. Most of our programming and interventions on these units involved bereavement and grief support, sibling education/support, and memory/legacy making. From my coursework and volunteer experiences at the University of Charleston, South Carolina, I had a solid foundational background with grief and bereavement through our child life courses, our death and dying course, our experiences with Shannon’s Hope, and our experiences with Rainbows. A family is forever changed when there is a loss of a family member, specifically a child (Pearson, 2005). A parents reaction to the death of a child greatly differs

The recovery process for Marilyn is complicated due to the unanticipated death of a family member and the residual grief that exists from her father’s death. Counseling should be implemented to facilitate Marilyn’s healing process. Marilyn has lost a son which is very dramatic for any individual. Feeling responsible for a child’s safety and well-being is a normal process. However, feelings of guilt and powerlessness can permeate the healing process and complicate grief when a child dies (Matzo & Sherman, 2015). A therapist who specializes in grief counseling could address some of Marilyn’s unique circumstances surrounding her son’s death, thus allowing her to move from chaos to

The death of a parent is never an easy thing to go through it is heartbreaking and overwhelming, but it is a different story when parent and child aren’t on the best of terms or possibly never really got to know each other. As a result of the parent passing it can cause the child to be haunted by the past always hoping their relationship could change. Once the parent passes it is impossible to reconcile any issues. The only option is to learn to forgive or forget any wrong doings and move on with life. Poets Lucille Clifton and Sylvia Plath both have poems that address this in very powerful and beautifully written ways. Both of their poems depict a speaker process of gaining freedom from their fathers after they have passed.

In America’s current culture death is a taboo subject that many individuals feel awkward talking about. Most individuals feel uncomfortable simply after hearing the word. After facing a death, the large majority of people decide to isolate themselves dealing with their grief alone. Bereavement is a complex feeling of emotions that many people do not know how to face on their own. Each individual goes through the bereavement process differently. Society usually focuses on adult grief, but lack to give attention towards children in these situations. Most people think that children are too young and naïve to feel and understand these emotions about grief. However, this is not the case children actually have complex emotions just like adults. Also children are very curious about death and need attention from adult to gain a full

My research topic is going to be on death and dying how it affects children. Coping with the death of a family member as an adult is hard enough. Now, imagine going through the lost of a parent as a child? I will be discussing how children cope with the death of a parent and whether if the child is affected more because of their age. Also, how the child deals with loneliness, and how their behavior changes. In addition, children experience struggles in school and loss of interest in goals. I will look into their struggles as students and whether their school is affected or not. This paper will focus on a emotional level with children of different ages and their struggles after the death of a parent. It is important is to study this area to help children, cope with death in a successful way.

famous quote that emphasizes the feelings of parents who have lost a child. It is

When a child loses a parent their world is turned upside down. Childhood grief is such a painful experience, yet it often goes underestimated because as children grow most physicians, educators or clergy are unable to recognize the signs of depression, loneliness or isolation in grieving children. Statistics show that one in nine Americans lose a parent before the age of 20 (Zaslow, 2012). Death of either parent is devastating, but the death of a father leaves children wondering who will take care of them. Fathers are seen as the protectors in our society, they are the ones who provide the money and stability for a family. Not only that, but fathers are the spiritual head of the family and when that disappears the dynamics change.

Death and dying is a natural and unavoidable process that all living creatures will experience at some point in life, whether it is one’s own person death or the death of a close friend or family member. Along with the experience of death comes the process of grieving which is the dealing and coping with the loss of the loved one. Any living thing can grieve and relate to a loss, even children (Shortle, Young, & Williams, 1993). “Childhood grief and mourning of family and friends may have immediate and long-lasting consequences including depression, anxiety, social withdrawal, behavioral disturbances, and school underachievement” (Kaufman & Kaufman, 2006, p. 61). American children today grow up in cultures that attempt to avoid grief and

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

People lose things everyday- be it an object or a loved one. Reactions in experiencing a loss vary from person to person. However, the bond between a parent and child remains shattered when a father suddenly loses his daughter. In James Russell Lowell’s poem “After the Burial”, a friend is comforting a father who lost his daughter. With difficulty, the father attempts to move on from his daughter’s death but is unable to, regardless of the comfort he receives.

A Journey in Grief: A Mothers Experience Following the Death of her Daughter by Alice W. Terry describes how the loss of someone so dear to you is unimaginable. When I was thirteen I lost my grandmother. She had been sick for a long time; I remember going to visit her in the hospital many times before she passed. The death of my grandmother was my first and only personal experience with the loss of a family member. Although this reality makes it hard for me to relate to this article at a personal level, I am truly grateful for the health and well being of those closest to me. Only being thirteen at this time, I was old enough to comprehend what had happened but I had not been old enough to truly experience the sorrow of losing someone. When I lost my grandmother, all I remember doing is crying. Although I was expressing emotion and grieving her loss, I do not remember having a conversation about what happened. How was I feeling? What is going through my head? Looking back now, it is frustrating to accept the fact that no one truly knew how to comfort me.

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

It is a fact of life that people die, and when they die, those left behind can have a hard time reconciling the fact that they are gone. The process of dealing with the grief that accompanies the loss of someone important is especially hard for children and teenagers to deal with. If parents don’t communicate with, or support, their children throughout the grieving process and help them manage their grief in a healthy manner, there can be significant repercussions. The importance of explaining, and helping children cope with grief is highlighted in the novel “Love Letters to the Dead” by Ava Dellaira and through my own experiences of dealing with loss. In “Love Letters to the Dead” we see how Laurel’s mother abandoning her and, not helping Laurel deal with her grief, causes Laurel to believe her mother blames her for her sister's death. We are shown by the author this miscommunication between Laurel and her mother around her sister's death and Laurel’s subsequent grief negatively impacts Laurel as she tries to overcome the loss of her sister. Furthermore, Laurel’s father inability to help her deal with the loss of her sister causes Laurel to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms that lead Laurel into a multitude of dangerous situations. In my own life, my parents did not help me understand the grief that accompanied the loss of my aunt, and as a result, I was unable to overcome the grief that I was dealing with fully. Additionally, when I faced loss for the second time, I was unprepared and did not know how to ask for help. Consequently, after not being given the tools to handle the grief correctly, I developed mental illnesses that impacted my everyday life, and I could not ask my parents for support, which is destructive in its own way.