Abstract
There are few other stressful events that occur in a child’s or adolescent’s life that have as potentially profound and lasting impact as the death of a parent. Yet, what evidence is there to support this statement? What, if any, kinds of mental health or adjustment problems might these children experience? And if the death of a parent does indeed put children or adolescents at risk, what are the important risk and protective factors that mediate or moderate the relationship between parental death and children’s adjustment? Finally, what kinds of preventive interventions have been or need to be developed for the parentally bereaved child? Some initial answers to these questions are provided in this chapter. We begin by discussing the epidemiology of parental death in children and adolescents. Next, we review the research literatures examining the risks of adjustment problems and other developmental outcomes in children and the mental health outcomes in adulthood. As part of these reviews, we use metaanalytic methods to begin to explore the strength of the findings across studies and at the same time offer critiques and point to some of the methodological limitations of these studies. We then turn to a review the literatures that have examined some of the factors associated with the effects of parental bereavement. We discuss the interventions that have been developed and experimentally evaluated for these children, and finally we conclude the chapter with some recommendations for further research in this area.
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Lutzke, J.R., Ayers, T.S., Sandler, I.N., Barr, A. (1997). Risks and Interventions for the Parentally Bereaved Child. In: Wolchik, S.A., Sandler, I.N. (eds) Handbook of Children’s Coping. Issues in Clinical Child Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-2677-0_8
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