Children's Adjustment to Parental death

http://www.antiochne.edu/directory/docs/gtremblaychildrens.pdf

In class we read an article discussing factors that are hypothesized to effect a child when experiencing their parents separation of rearrangement of their family as in the addition of a step family. This article made me curious to know the different factors that might determine how a child will fair after the death of a parent. I found many articles most of which were actually around the topic of adjusting after sibling death. I chose not to change topic to sibling death because I wanted to be able to compare the process that I went through after my father's death to that of what is considered to be a "normal" grieving process for children and adolescents.
The paper I found most useful for what i was looking for was written by George c Tremblay and Allen C. Isreal of the University of Albany and State university of New York (see link above for full text). The paper entitled Children's Adjustment to Parental Death reviews the evidence regarding acute and long-term psychological adjustment of children after the death of a parent as well as the clinical literature describing interventaions for bereaved families. I am not so mutch interested in the latter.

According to the 1991 Census about 1 in 20 kids will experience the loss of a parent before the gae of 18.

Before begining the comparison of "normal" grieving to my own experience, I would like to acknowledge a statement that I particularly apreciated:
"Despite efforts from several theoretical perspectives to describe a "normal" grieving process, appreciating the scope of grief's impact and differentiating "complicated" or "pathological" mourning from a normal developmental process continue to present challenges for the field."

Empirical observations have been made that show many parallels the the gieving process for children and adults: The general patterns of mixed anxiouse and depressed symptomes has been documented amoung toddlers, prepubertal children, and adolecents according to studies done by Kranzle, Shaffer, Wasserman and Davis in 1990; Silverman and Worden in 1992; and Gray in 1987.
It is said that even very young children experience recognizable grief symptomes, but their external behaviors differ in some ways from adults.
The following is a list of child gief symptomes found in the paper that I experienced:
>Appear glib or unemotional in the face of a loss.
>Blithly announce the death to casual acuaintances. Once I even reported the death of my father and grandfather to the sales clerck because I couldn't remeber who's birthday it was (their birthdays are 3 days apart)
>Inability to grasp the significance of the loss all at once
>Ignorance of social expectations regarding mourning behavior
>May approach grief in doses they can tolerate offten with periods of avoidance. i still do this.
>Lack of fluency in identifying and describing feeling states may promote more somatic expressions of distress
>May repeatedly seek reassurance or information related to these issues, often to the discomfort of adults. I even went so far as to make an appointment with me dad's oncologist to have her explain the molecular decomposition of his body and why it effected they way he behaved in the end.

An interesting observation made that ties this article to the article about divorce assigned in class is that the emphasis in explaining long-term effects has shifted from the death and accompanying mourning processes to the changes in family circumstances...like the changes in family circumstance that may effect a child during a divorce.

This quote really shed some light on some of my circumstance, "With adequate care prior to and after the loss, the risk of adult caseness is not apparently raised by the loss of the mother; therefore, the results suggest that it is the quality of attachment and not the trauma of the loss that holds the key to later psychological well-being." Bifulco et al.'s 1992 pg 446. The attachment I had to my father was very VERY strong. I had no desire to be in the same room as my mother. They were divorced, so it was easy to avoid her. However, after his death I was left to live with the unaffectionate wench full time. I went from a supportive loving environment to a a very negative and authoritative hose hold in which it wasn't ok to express emotions. This obviously had some serious effects on having a "normal" grieving process. My ability to form interpersonal relationships was shot. I found myself incapable of having a romantic relationships and sought only loyalty in friendships. I unconsciously wasn't willing to be abandoned so I put up with a lot of relational bullying because my best friend wouldn't leave me if I put up with her shit. People, especially ex-boyfriends, would have described me as cold/hard and uncaring. I had a massive shell that I denied even after a year of therapy. I denied anything was wrong with me. I have since gone through more therapy and a few years of self exploration coupled with tools (from therapy) to help build healthy friendships. I've accepted my mother for the bitch she is and have built relationships with the adults who knew me as a child. I use each new romantic relationship as a learning opportunity and try to stay in them for as long as possible to learn as much as I can. So far the longest of my many MANY relationships has lasted a mear 7 months. I also recently discovered how high of a pedestal I put my father on. No man will ever measure up, so I prefer to date women which presents a whole new plethora of psychological barriers to weave my way around.
Now that I have written a mini essay on my grief story, let me conclude the findings of the article.
The findings presented throughout the article explore only a few variables and stats even fewer as crucial determinant of acute and long-term adaptation to the loss of a parent. These important variables include the quality of parent-child relations before and after the death, the availability of social support for children, and the stability of family circumstances. These variable is different terms were among the 5 variables listed in the divorce article.

End note, "Parental death is best understood as creating a vulnerability, rather than inflicting a crippling injury by itself."