In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of mental health professionals writing about childhood grief and trauma gradually came to an agreement about how the relationship between them had long been overlooked by their fellow clinicians. They agreed as well that the loss of a parent constitutes a psychic trauma in children, with the type of loss determining the severity of the trauma, such that a child who loses a parent to suicide, murder or a tragic accident will suffer a more severe trauma than the child whose parent dies following a chronic illness.
Parent loss of any kind hits children particularly hard because they have not yet developed the coping skills and ego strength necessary to process such a potentially overwhelming event. In their 1985 book, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Children, researchers Spencer Eth and Robert Pynoos described the ways in which children struggle to process the traumatic loss of a parent. Their psychological immaturity often leads to unhealthy attempts to master trauma and resolve grief, the researchers said.
In their work with children suffering the effects of parent loss, Eth and Pynoos said that a focus on the more short-term phenomenon of grief can distract from giving attention to the more long-term phenomenon of trauma. They stressed the importance of assessing the traumatic impact of parent loss on a child as soon as possible.
It is important for therapists to understand children’s grief as thoroughly as possible so that they can begin to attend to the larger issue of their trauma. In the passage below, Eth and Pynoos describe the phenomenon of grief and the process of resolving it:
“Grief is the subjective experience and behavior that occurs after a significant loss, while mourning refers to the process of the attenuation of grief as an adaptation to loss. Children are capable of a wide range of grief responses, whose expression is influenced by the child’s level of development, personality, and cultural milieu. The tasks of mourning in childhood are similar to those for adults. The child must first accept the loss through reality testing and then tolerate the experience of the pain of grief. The child may feel sad, angry, guilty, lonely, tired, confused, preoccupied and perhaps even ill. The deceased will be remembered, as the child struggles to adjust to the new environment. There follows the slow withdrawal of attachment to the deceased and the increasing availability of psychic energy for forging new or stronger relationships.”
The authors then go on to describe how grief in children can differ from grief in adults. Adults may miss the signs of grief in children because children’s short attention span means they cannot sustain feelings of sadness and other signs of grief as long as adults can.
In addition, the defense mechanisms children employ against grief may seem classically childlike. Sigmund Freud wrote about a 10-year-old boy who knew his parent was dead, but apparently could not grasp the practical implications of his father’s death. The boy wondered why his father could not come to supper. These sorts of cognitive difficulties can often delay or inhibit the mourning process.
Like adults, however, children can exhibit the signs of pathological grief. Researchers describe pathological grief as “an intensification of grief to the level where the person is overwhelmed, resorts to maladaptive behavior, or remains interminably in the state of grief without progression of the mourning process toward completion.”
