When a child dies: bereaved parents
The death of a son or daughter, at any age and from any cause, for the people who raised them. The parents of a 40-year-old who died have lost a child too. The death reverses the order a family expects, and it takes the future the parent had pictured along with the person.
What drives it
A parent’s days and sense of self are often built around the child, so the death removes a role as well as a person, and it returns at every age the child would have reached. Useful for identification because the weight shows up for years in health and mortality, and because bereaved parents are often told things about their future (the marriage will end, time alone will settle it) that the research does not bear out.
How it shows
Work
Back at the desk when the leave runs out, with a colleague’s graduation photo of their son on the next screen. Freezing when a new client asks ‘how many children do you have?’. Staying late because the house is too still.
Relationships
Two parents grieving on different clocks, one wanting the bedroom kept as it was and the other wanting to box it up. Friends with children the same age who stop calling. A surviving child who feels they lost both parents to the grief, or who tries to cause no trouble at all.
Self
Notice the ages: the birthday they would have had, the year their friends finish school or marry. Notice the answer you give to ‘how many children?’ and what it costs. Notice whether your own health has been left to slide since the death.
What tells it apart
Prolonged grief disorder (ICD-11, DSM-5-TR): Most bereaved parents grieve hard for years and keep living alongside it. Prolonged grief may fit when, a year or more on, longing fills nearly every day and the rest of life has stopped around it.
Traumatic grief after a sudden or violent death: When the child died suddenly or violently, images of how it happened may crowd in beside the loss. Traumatic grief more likely describes that part, and the two often run together.
Grief after miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death: Perinatal loss covers a baby who died in pregnancy, at birth or soon after, when there may be few memories to grieve with. This entry covers a child of any age, where the grief more likely draws on years of shared life.
A test
Ask how long it has been, and what has changed in the parent’s health, work and marriage since. Grief that is still heavy many years after a child’s death may be what the research would expect, and is less likely to mean the parent is grieving wrongly.
Questions to carry
- The last time someone asked how many children I have, what did I say, and what did I leave out?
- What have I stopped doing for myself since my child died?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
strong. Denmark’s national registers (Li, Precht, Mortensen and Olsen, Lancet, 2003) followed 21,062 parents whose child had died for up to 18 years, against 293,745 other parents. Mothers’ overall death rate was 43% higher, and their risk of dying from unnatural causes such as suicide and accidents was nearly four times higher in the first three years. Fathers showed an early rise in unnatural deaths only. Sweden’s registers (Rostila, Saarela and Kawachi, 2012) found raised mortality in mothers after the death of a child aged 10 to 25. In the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (Rogers and colleagues, Journal of Family Psychology, 2008), 428 parents bereaved an average of 18 years earlier, compared with 428 matched parents, reported more depressive symptoms, poorer health and more marital disruption. Those with a sense of purpose or other children fared better, and the cause of death and the years since did not predict recovery. The figure that most bereaved couples divorce has no study behind it. Harriet Schiff’s 1977 book said as many as 90% of bereaved couples were in serious marital difficulty and cited no source, and a review (Schwab, Death Studies, 1998) found the citations for a high divorce rate questionable and marital distress confused with divorce. A 2006 survey commissioned by The Compassionate Friends put divorce after a child’s death at about 16%, with fewer than half of those saying the death played a part, though it was not peer reviewed. Norway’s registers (Lyngstad, 2013) did find a higher divorce rate in bereaved parents than in other parents, so the strain on couples is measurable even though the ‘most couples split’ figure is unfounded.
Where it comes from
Harriet Sarnoff Schiff, The Bereaved Parent, 1977. Dennis Klass, Parental Grief: Solace and Resolution, 1988. The Compassionate Friends, which first met in Coventry, England, in January 1969, started by two families whose sons had died and the hospital chaplain Simon Stephens