Raising Grieving Children

How children can survive the death of a loved one.

by Phyllis R. Silverman, Ph.D.

How Do Ideas Get Generated

children think about dead parent, talk to them, do not put past behind them

Published on October 29, 2009 by Phyllis R. Silverman, Ph.D. in Raising Grieving Children

I have been thinking lately about the whole question of how we relate to the person who has died. For many years, the bereaved were counseled to let go of the past, to free themselves of their relationship with the past so that they could move on to new relationships in a world without the deceased. It was assumed that mourners who wanted to talk about the deceased and in whose life the deceased still had a place were those who had a difficult time dealing with the loss, and who would have a problematic outcome. If you think about this advice, implicit in it is the assumption that we have only caring relationships in our lives at a time. This is not how life works. Being told to let go of the past has often created problems for the bereaved. They were discouraged from remembering and often from talking about the person who died. Most of the bereaved I met were not comfortable with this advice. I began to wonder whether this was good advice or even realistic advice.

This all came together for me in analyzing interviews with the children who had agreed to participate in the Harvard/MGH Child Bereavement Study. This was a study of 120 children between the ages of 6 and 17, in 70 families, whose parent died from any one of a number of causes. Bill Worden and I were co-principal investigators. The more I read, the more I realized that these young people had not read the books on how they should grieve. They did not know they were supposed to let go, to put the past behind them.. My colleague Steven Nickman, a child psychiatric, who was consultant to the project, and I started reading interviews together. It became clear that most of the children in one manner or another had an on going relationship with their dead parent. We identified some of the ways in which these informants remained connected to their dead parent shortly after the death. They located the deceased and for most American children they saw their parent in heaven. In the words of a 14 year old:

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I want my father to see me perform. If I said a dead person can't see then I would not be able to have my wish that he sees what I am doing. I believe that the dead see, hear and move. Don't ask me how, I just believe it. Heaven is a mysterious place. My father is with all the other relatives that died.

Older children could say that they wanted to think of the dead as being able to see and hear. A 15 year old girl talked about experiencing the dead:

I think heaven is not a definite place. I know I am not imagining him... its not as if I actually see him standing there, but I feel him and like, in my mind I hear his voice.

One thing that surprised everyone, both the parents and those of us conducting the study, was that children would visit their parent in the cemetery. In small towns in New England, the cemetery was often on the way home from school and children as young as 12 would stop off and visit with their parent to talk about how things had gone at school or with friends. Younger children talked about the connection in a different way but it was nonetheless there. I will elaborate on this list in my next blog. We also found that it is easier for children to talk with you if you ask them who died, rather than start a discussion with how they feel about their loss.

Nickman and I later collaborated with Dennis Klass in editing a book on this subject and in so doing, we found a name for this experience . We called it Continuing Bonds. We found that over time the connection does change, but in one way or another it is still there.