Living With Grief

Children, Adolescents and Loss

Kenneth J. Doka, Kenneth J. Doka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135056094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Salute mentale in psicologia

Living With Grief: Children, Adolescents, and Loss, (2000) edited by Kenneth J. Doka, features articles by leading educators and clinicians in the field of grief and bereavement. The chapters entitled "Voices" are the writings of children and adolescents. The book includes a comprehensive resource list of national organizations and a useful bibliography of age-appropriate literature for children and adolescents.

Part I

Theoretical Overview

In a 1972 seminal article, revised and reprinted in this volume, Robert Kastenbaum suggested that we like to think of childhood as “the kingdom where nobody dies.” Yet much as we like to think we can protect children and adolescents from loss and death, the power to do so eludes us. As Kastenbaum notes, from early ages, children are constantly exposed to dying, death, loss, and grief in many ways—from games, music, and television, to their own experiences and concerns. The question of “how can we protect” is moot. The meaningful question is, “How can we prepare and support children and adolescents as they cope with loss?”

It is this question that guides this book, much as it guides the Hospice Foundation of America's Seventh Annual National Bereavement Teleconference on Living With Grief: Children, Adolescents, and Loss. Both the teleconference and this book strive to offer sound theoretical underpinnings, as well as practical clinical suggestions in helping children and adolescents cope with loss.

This opening section attempts to establish a theoretical base. The chapters and Voices pieces trace the development of children and adolescents, emphasizing the ways in which this developmental process contributes to how children and adolescents experience, express, and adapt to loss. Throughout these chapters, certain themes emerge.

Children and Adolescents Experience a Wide Range of Losses

We can make a critical error in assuming that losses through death are the only losses children and adolescents experience. Gordon notes in the foreword that, as with adults, the range of losses that children and adolescents grieve can be extensive. As they age, children and adolescents must adapt to a variety of developmental losses, including, for example, the loss of childhood. Even transitions such as graduation may include elements of grief. Friendships change. People move. In adolescence, they may experience the loss of romantic relationships. Dreams may die, too, as adolescents realize they may not become the actor or athlete they hoped to be. Illness and disability both involve loss.

There may be other losses as well. Death may strike family, friends, or pets. Parents may be separated, divorced, or incarcerated. Young people may be placed in foster care or sent away to different institutions. As Kastenbaum well emphasizes, children and adolescents are not strangers to loss.

Children and Adolescents Are Constantly Developing

Kastenbaum, Corr, and Balk emphasize the continued development that takes place as children grow into late adolescence. This development proceeds on all levels. They develop cognitively, mastering, over time, more mature understandings of complex concepts such as death or loss. Yet they develop in other ways as well.

As children age, they learn to manage affect. Young children, for example, often have a “short feeling span.” They are unable to sustain strong feelings for long periods of time. Mood shifts are frequent. Children and adolescents develop socially, gradually moving from an egocentric perspective that looks at any loss through a very personal lens, to one that sees the broader relational aspects of loss. The child who wonders who will take him fishing now that Grandpa has died is able, at an older age, to empathize with his grandmother's loss. Children develop spiritually as well. At early ages, Coles (1990) reminds us, children still grapple with spiritual issues as “spiritual pioneers,” struggling to explore what to them is unmapped territory. Later, they will both develop and continually reevaluate their spiritual beliefs. Yet as we attempt to understand this developmental process, Suarez and McFeaters add a further caution. The filters—cultural and experiential—that frame their lives always affect this process.

This developmental process affects grief and mourning. An early question of research asked, “At what age can children be said to grieve?” The articles in this section answer clearly: At any age, but in ways that are both similar to and different from the ways grief and mourning manifests itself in adults.

Support is Critical

All the chapters in this section emphasize the critical nature of understanding and support. Children and adolescents are helped when adults around them recognize that they grieve and support them as they mourn. Yet there may be limits to that support. Parents may be coping with loss themselves, limiting their own energy and ability to help.

Johns’ chapter emphasizes the critical role that schools can offer. Schools, he reminds us, play many roles in the lives of youth. Here a range of supportive adults can assist children and adolescents as they cope with loss. But our Voices pieces add a note of caution. The anonymous piece sadly reminds us that teachers too are human and some may lack sensitivity and empathy. The dialogue between Whitehead and Atkins expresses the many hesitations that adolescents have in reaching for support from their schools. And Janczuk's Voices piece stresses a critical point—that students away at school may also be away from critical sources of support. These pieces do not belie Johns’ contention that schools can be a vital resource, but they emphasize both barriers and the need for effort, education, and training.

Finally, the anonymous piece hints at the value of other sources of support such as counseling. It is this theme that will be emphasized in the next section.

1

The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

This is an updated version of an article that first appeared in Saturday Review of Literature (December 23, 1972).

Robert Kastenbaum

Children are playing and shouting in the early morning sunshine near the end of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck. They are chanting a variant of the very familiar rhyme: “Ring-a-ring-a roses, all fall down! Ring-a-ring-a roses, all….” The game is interrupted by the excited entry of other children, one of whom shouts to Marie's child, “Hey, your mother is dead!” But Marie's child responds only by continuing to ride his hobbyhorse. “Hop, hop! Hop, hop! Hop, hop!” The other children exchange a few words about what is “out there, on the path by the pool,” and run off to see for themselves. The newly orphaned child hesitates for an instant and then rides off in the direction of his playmates. End of opera.

What begins for Marie's child? Without knowing the details of his fate, we can sense the confusion, vulnerability, and terror that mark this child's entry into the realm of calamity and grief. Adult protection has failed. The grown-ups, as it has turned out, couldn't even protect themselves. The reality of death has shattered the make-believe of childhood.

Children often are exposed to death in ways much less dramatic than the sudden demise of a parent. A funeral procession passes by. A pet dies. An innocent question is raised at the dinner table: “This didn't come from a real live cow, did it, like Elsie, the one we saw at school today?” Many of the questions children ask about death make parents uncomfortable. During research interviews, mothers of young children clearly identified a reason for this discomfort. One woman recalled that, “We never spoke about dying or death in my house, even when there was a funeral. If my parents ever did talk about it, they made sure that the kids weren't around.” Another remembered being told that God wanted her older sister. “I didn't think God was so nice after that, and I worried a lot about getting older and that God might want me, too.”

With few exceptions, the mothers agreed that the subject of death had been locked in silence and tension. In consequence, they felt unprepared and insecure when it was their turn to respond to a child's curiosity about death. “I wanted to find just that one thing to say that would put Jeff's mind at ease and I guess, really, just get him off the subject. But—and this is going to sound terrible—I heard myself sounding just like my mother, talking in a forced and fakey voice. I don't think she convinced herself when she was trying to convince me, and she didn't, and I couldn't when it was my turn.”

The intrusion of death, even in words alone, can make loving and capable parents feel awkward. They are not able to relax and observe, much less appreciate, how resourcefully children attempt to comprehend the mysteries of loss, discontinuity, absence, and death. Adults do have the responsibility to protect their children from stress and harm. Yet much can be learned if we are able to drop our guard on occasion and participate in the child's discovery of death. Nobody comes to an understanding of life without coming to some kind of understanding of death, and this process begins earlier than most of us have imagined. In observing children's efforts to comprehend death we are granted the opportunity to witness sparks of creativity and surges of courage that can only enhance our respect for their spirits.

Death in the Everyday Life of Children

A child's fascination with death can demonstrate itself almost at any time and place. Mortality is a theme that finds its way into many of the child's activities, whether solitary or social, and so it has been for as long as history has had a voice. Consider games, for example. “Ring-around-the-rosey” has been a popular childhood play theme throughout much of the world. Our grandparents delighted in “all fall down,” as did their ancestors all the way back to the fifteenth century. The origin of this game, however, was anything but delightful.

Medieval society was almost totally helpless against bubonic plague—the Black Death. It has been estimated that at least one-fourth of the Asian and European populations perished during the most intense plague years. If adults could not ward off death, what could children do? They could join hands. They could form a circle of life. They could chant ritualistically and move together in a reassuring rhythm of unity. This demonstration of safety in numbers and human contact would not persist, though. The children also had to recognize their peril by enacting death. One child would drop out of the slowly moving circle and spin lifelessly to the ground. The circle would then tighten and close again, small voices still chanting. A few minutes later another child would drop to the ground, and the circle would contract again. And so it went, until only one child remained standing to chant plaintively, “All fall down.” This game of childhood was not so simple after all. It not only recognized the peril of imminent death and loss but also provided comfort through a bonding ritual. Furthermore—and perhaps most subtly—death had been made to follow the rules of the game. Ring-around-the-rosey had another distinct advantage over its model—one could arise to play again. How joyous it must have been to laugh and leap up from the ground. True, one might fall again, and this time for real. But even a little triumph over death was a triumph.

In their own way the children were participating in medieval Europe's response to devastation by capturing and mocking death through dramatic enactments, songs, and caricatures. Young children were not too young to apply themselves to this enterprise, just as vulnerable children in violent environments today find ways to incorporate death into their lives as a sort of immunization. In Northern Ireland, for example, children have played “soldier and terrorist” instead of “cops and robbers.”

Death has been ritualized in many other children's games as well. In the playful romping of “tag,” what is the hidden agenda or mystery, that makes the chaser it? Folklorists (Opie and Opie, 1969) have amassed evidence strongly suggesting that it is death's stand-in. Death (or The Dead Man) is sometimes the actual name given to the chaser. In the English game “Dead Man Arise,” the central player lies prostrate on the ground while other children either mourn over him or seek to bring him back to life. When least expected, up jumps John Brown, The Dead Man, the Water Sprite, Death Himself, or whatever name local custom prefers. The children flee or freeze in pretend surprise as the chaser whirls toward them for a tag that will bestow Dead Man status upon the victim.

In her pioneering studies of children's thoughts of death, Sylvia Anthony (1948/1972) identified a phenomenon she called oscillation. Her respondents, mostly happy and normal children, often spontaneously reversed roles in death games. Now they would be the poor, sad victim of a terrible accident or murder. Now they would be the person causing the “accident,” or even the cold-blooded killer. Anthony concluded that children take all possible roles in death as a way of getting their minds around this challenging problem. She likened this process to the delight that very young children take in feeding the person who is feeding them. Spontaneous experiential learning is a talent that seems to develop early and that is quickly put to use. The findings of Anthony and other researchers should provide a little comfort to parents. If we observe a touch of sadism in our children, this probably does not mean that we have been raising monsters. It is far more likely that they are attempting to transform some of their sense of vulnerability to the active mode, a counterphobic move that has adaptive value if not taken too far. Similarly, when children play dead they are not necessarily demonstrating pathological morbidity. They are probably a lot more like the kids I've watched scrambling around rocks and trees enacting occasional melodramatic deaths that are reversed by a tickle. They arise, literally tickled to be alive again, having survived a micro-simulation of what it might be like to be really and truly dead.

Children's games that have been passed on from generation to generation may themselves be on the endangered list. There are fewer neighborhoods in which children play their traditional street games. Children's games have become influenced significantly by movies, television, and computer systems at the same time that “keeping kids off the streets” has been replacing the outdoor neighborhood experience. Death continues to have its place, although the forms may vary. “Bang, ba...