Bereaving In America's Current Culture

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

This assignment is about how children deal with death and how they need to grieve. It explains how children feel and react to the death of a relation. It explains how a child needs to talk about their feelings and not to hide away. This needs to be done in a sensitive manner. The child needs to be told the truth and told that they are not to blame in anyway. Play acting or drawing pictures or writing stories may help the child to express their feelings. It may take a long time for a child to come to terms with their loss. Children are not all the same and will all react differently to

Children and adult griefs are quite similar, yet children have a smaller range of language abilities to express their emotions. When a child griefs, they can experience several characteristics depending in their age group. In the reading Grieving Children and Adolescents: Developmental Consideration, from birth to age 3 infants and children cannot understand the meaning of forever. However images, words and symbols into meaningful information. During these years, a child can have small sense about an absence from a parent who died. Also children would expect their dying member to return. In ages three to five, have a egocentric mentally. They can become verbal, express fears and believe that death is reversible. Children be believe that the

Most parent’s greatest fear is the death of a child. The experience each parent or caregiver will be based on the meanings they create through their interactions within their individual experience. Whether it is a something expected or unexpected, each parent or caregiver be offered services through the health care settings or social environments/resources in the community and whether or not these interactions or services meet their needs could affect the bereavement process for the parents or caregivers.

The way most children respond to loss is by first encountering shock, which may be associated with numbness and denial. Secondly, they will experience a sense of yearning or protest for the object lost or the deceased. The next stages of child grief is then despair, followed by recovery where they will have an increase in their well-being, acceptance and adaptation to the loss. Yet, research suggests that if these steps of grief are not successfully completed, the child will suffer complicated grief and may regress to previous stages of development (A Developmental Psychopathology Framework of the Psychosocial Needs of Children Orphaned by HIV, 2009). During the stages of grief, a five-year-old child may be susceptible to loss of sleep, a loss of appetite, extreme tiredness and sometimes a loss of interest in life (National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes Health, 2011).

This journal submission is a reflection on the July 14th (PTSD), 21st (Children & Grief), and 28th (Children & Grief cont.) class lectures and the videos, Alive Day, HBO (2006), Helping Children Grieve, Ford and D’Arcy, and will be the last in this series.

During my interview with Mrs. Edwards we discussed questions related to my research as well as her personal life. I began by making sure Mrs. Edwards had personally experiences grieving in children as a result of death from a loved one. After confirming that she was a qualified candidate we continued to discuss how children of different age groups reacted to death and the effect death had of children individually. The interview with Mrs. Edwards focused more on the differences within children rather than their similarities. We focused on topics such as: the differences she noticed in children’s grieving in relation to their personalities, how popular television shows and peer influence how they grieve, how mental capacity affects a child’s

I enjoy reading your post. Having an open communication can help kids cope with bereavement. It’s important for parents to talk to their children about death, this may help them to discover what they know and do not know. Or if they have fears, or worries. The death of someone close is extremely painful and therefore parents or guardians need find ways to protect the child. I agree with you, is helpful is provide convincing assurance that there will always be somebody to love and look after the child; this will bring support to the child, and will help them not feel hopeless or alone is this world. Also, parents and guardians need to be emotional, mental and physical prepared in order to support their bereaved child.

While the bereavement process may be a universal chapter of life, the experience itself is conclusively subjective. Specifically for younger individuals, bereavement is a very complex encounter because developmental factors must be considered. The loss of an individual in a child’s life is heavily influenced by the time in which it occurs because coping mechanisms may or may not be developed. For example, if a child does not understand the context of death, they most likely will not have adequate coping skills to process this life-changing experience. Children and adolescents who are facing bereavement may face developmental relapse as well as changes in social, behavioral,

Adolescents grieving is similar to a child than an adult. Adolescents range from the ages of ten to twenty-two years old. Throughout their grieving process adolescent have a range of many emotions and inner conflicts which are greatly influenced by their biologically changes in their bodies. During times of grief, adolescents also face inner conflicts of life, death, loneliness, frustration, depression and so forth. These questions of life and death gives opportunities to many adolescents to explore their spirituality or religion. Adolescents also have an egocentric altitude, which makes them believe that their situation is different then everyone else’s. Even though the youth can be dealing with inner conflicts, many youth would not express their emotions with others. Even though adolescents may not express their feeling their actions, low grades, violence, sexual behavior is an alert sign to parents that there something wrong. Teenagers would also think that their “immoral” and would do risky activities just to test their lives.

The article Death of a parent and the children’s experience, is a very interesting and informative piece. The author Rachel Fearnley, gives a powerful presentation on a child’s bereavement process. Many believe that children are unable to comprehend till the later adolescences but that death of a parent causes many developmental issues if gone unresolved. All children handle death or loss in different ways but according her extensive studies, all age groups displayed the same developmental issues. The studies conducted were not only with children but in how caregivers also approached the bereavement children. The evidence from the current research would suggest that there is a stigma attached to talking about death and dying and that practitioners find it difficult and embarrassing to discuss such topics. This sequestration leads to a pattern of communicating that avoids any involvement of such unmentionable vocabulary. Additionally, within social work practice, it has been highlighted that ‘‘practitioners are frequently required to talk with children about complicated and painful issues and during uncertain times in their lives’’ (Lefevre et al., 2008, p. 171). The need for

“Ordinary people” everywhere are faced day after day with the ever so common tragedy of losing a loved one. As we all know death is inevitable. We live with this harsh reality in the back of our mind’s eye. Only when we are shoved in the depths of despair can we truly understand the multitude of emotions brought forth. Although people may try to be empathetic, no one can truly grasp the rawness felt inside of a shattered heart until death has knocked at their door. We live in an environment where death is invisible and denied, yet we have become desensitized to it. These inconsistencies appear in the extent to which families are personally affected by death—whether they

Family Support and a Child’s Adjustment to Death asks if a family’s influence in a child’s understanding of death will show the child’s participation through a death. Two major methods were used to collect the data of this article. One being a parent questionnaire that documented family demographic information and the other method was a complex child interview schedule. Families that had less understanding about death, and less likely to allow their children to participate in death related activities were highly cohesive families. Results show that children who partake in the family’s death-related experiences had a huge understanding of death. Future research directions should test all children of the same age or a specific mutual death between the children.

When someone dies in the family, everyone is affected, even the youngest member of the family. Adults often like to think that children are too young to feel despair and deep sadness that grief can bring. Unfortunately, it is not the case. Death is common aspect of every human being’s life, even young children. It also is a common theme in many television shows, cartoons, books, and many others: Nemo's mom is eaten by a barracuda, uncle Ben from Spiderman, and let's not forget all the soldiers killed in Mulan. Even if children don't grasp the concept of death perfectly, they are still aware of it. For that reason, it is important to understand that children grieve just as deeply as adults, but they show it in different ways. Their understanding,