Compare and contrast the experiences of families after the death of a child, sibling, parent, and spouse/life-partner.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers may include:
a. Children deal with many losses (e.g., death of pet, neighbor, peer, or grandparent; family move or divorce). From infancy onward, children recognize loss and do grieve, and their grief corresponds with the cognitive developmental stage that guides their other thinking processes (Essa & Murray, 1994)
b. A death that may not appear to affect a child may be revisited later in life and expressed in a new way. As they move into new stages of cognitive development, children gain skills and resources for making sense of the world, they revisit their losses, and their meaning of events incorporates their new level of understanding (e.g., their understanding of what “permanent” means). Their grief is renegotiated, not resolved.
c. Factors that appear to influence childhood grieving include positive relationships and ample emotional and psychological support with a parent/caregiver, as well as open, honest, and developmentally appropriate communication about the death. Instead of insulating and isolating children from loss, encouraging (but not requiring) them to participate in family rituals and death-related activities allows them to develop skills for coping with loss. Generally, children who do best following the death of a loved one are those who experience the fewest additional changes and disruptions in their lives (Murray, 2001; Shapiro, 2001).
d. Most research on sibling death is recent, focused on children and adolescents. Prior work on sibling loss generally was confined to clinical studies; recent work differentiates normal and complicated sibling grief patterns. Even in the same family, sibling grief reactions are not uniform or the same as parents, but they can be understood best in relation to individual characteristics (e.g., sex, developmental stage, relationship to the sibling). Scholars have not reported consistent behavioral or at-risk differences in school-age children who experienced parental death or sibling death, but they have found gender differences, with boys more affected by the loss of a parent and girls impacted more by the death of a sibling, especially a sister (Worden, Davies, & McCown, 1999).
e. Siblings have unique bonds that continue following the death of a brother or sister (Packman, Horsley, & Davies, 2006). Deceased siblings also play an identity function for survivors who may feel a need to fulfill roles the deceased children played for parents or to act in an opposite manner in an attempt to show that they are different.
f. The death of a parent can occur during childhood or adulthood. Children’s reactions to parental death vary and are influenced by emotional and cognitive development, closeness to the deceased parent, responses of/interactions with the surviving parent, and perceptions of social support. Researchers have reported evidence of complicated grief, traumatic grief, and posttraumatic growth in parentally bereaved children and adolescents (Melhem, Moritz, Walker, Shear, & Brent, 2007; Wolchik, Coxe, Tein, Sandler, & Ayers, 2008). Adolescents grieving the death of a parent appear to have heightened interpersonal sensitivity, characterized by uneasiness and negative expectations regarding personal exchanges (Servaty-Sieb & Hayslip, 2003).
g. Among the family losses during adulthood, the death of a spouse has been the most intensively studied; however, less attention has been given to spousal death in early or middle adulthood, widowed parents with dependent children, or death of other life partners such as committed homosexual couples. Loneliness and emotional adjustment are major concerns of spouses who lose a companion and source of emotional support, particularly in a long interdependent relationship in which there was a shared identity based on systems of roles and traditions (Moss et al., 2001). Conjugal bereavement can be especially difficult for individuals whose relationships assumed a sharp division of traditional sex roles, leaving them unprepared to assume the range of tasks required to maintain a household. The death of one’s spouse brings up issues of self-definition and prompts the need to develop a new identity. Despite these problems, many bereaved spouses adjust very well, and the death of a partner does not always result in grief for the other (Watford, 2008). Some derive pleasure and independence from the new lifestyle, feeling more competent than when they were married.