Title: Loss of a Mother or Father - Dealing With the Loss of a Parent
Headings: Loss of a Parent
Loss of a Parent
Adult Grief Over Loss of a Parent
Children’s Grief Over Loss of a Parent
Behavioral Grief Symptoms in Children Include:

Content: The loss affects adult personality development, a sense of security, and relationships with the surviving parent and significant others. Loss of a parent at an early age has been shown to lead to long-term psychological damage in children, especially when the parent lost is the mother. To prevent this, psychologists suggest grief therapy for the child, allowing the child to express his or her feelings and providing feedback and activities to pursue when grief resurfaces. According to Psychologist J.W. Worden, and the Harvard Child Bereavement Study (HCBS), children have four “tasks” of mourning they must accomplish in order to process the death of a parent: They must accept the reality of the parent’s death. They must experience the grieving and emotional pain of the loss. They must adjust to the world in which the deceased is no longer there. They must find ways to memorialize the deceased, and relocate the lost parent within his or her life in a different way. In a 1999 study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence entitled “Children's Psychological Distress Following the Death of a Parent,” girls were more likely to experience depressive symptoms after the loss of a parent than boys. Additionally, younger children were more at risk for depressive symptoms than older children.