Children, Adolescents, and Death: Questions and Answers

313 Pages·2017·2.05 MB·English

by  Robert G. Stevenson and Gerry R. Cox (eds.)

Children, Adolescents
and Death
T he topic of death and related issues (such as grief) often begins with questions. When the
questions come from, or are about, children or adolescents, they bring an additional com-
ponent . . . the fear some adults have of giving a “wrong” answer. In this context a wrong
answer is one that can cause more harm than good for the child or adolescent who asked the
question. This book provides information that can be used to address death-related ques-
tions from children and adolescents. It also looks at questions from caring adults about the
way children or adolescents view death and the grief that follows a death or any major loss.
Children, Adolescents and Death c overs topics that start with early studies of child-
hood grief and progress to expression of grief in cyberspace. There is no one answer to
most of the questions in this book. There are contributors from a number of continents,
countries, cultures and academic disciplines, each of whom brings a unique view of the
issues they discuss. There are presentations of practical interventions that others may copy,
upon which they can build. There are a number of chapters that look at death education
in both family and school settings. This work contains ideas and techniques that can be of
value to parents, educators, counselors, therapists, spiritual advisors, caring adults and, of
course, will be of the most benefi t to those who ask the most questions . . . the children and
adolescents themselves.
Robert G. Stevenson i s a senior professor in the graduate counseling program of Mercy
College in New York. He has published over 60 journal articles and book chapters and
edited/authored several books. His most recent is F inal Acts: End of Life, Hospice and
Palliative Care (Baywood, 2013). He holds a BA (Holy Cross), MA (Montclair State
University), and MAT and EdD (Fairleigh Dickinson University). He developed the fi rst
independent course on death education at the high school level and taught it for 25 years.
He is a member of the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement and
the Association for Death Education and Counseling. He received the 2013 Robert Fulton
Founder’s Award from the Center for Death Education and Bioethics. He co-founded a
community grief support center, the Jamie Schuman Center, in Hillsdale, NJ. He worked
as a counselor in Paterson, NJ for fi ve years with parolees reentering society from state
prisons and adolescents in recovery. He received the Defense of Freedom Medal from NY
State for his work in the NY Guard after 9/11.
Gerry R. Cox i s professor emeritus of sociology/archaeology at the University of
Wisconsin–La Crosse. He served as the Director of the Center for Death Education &
Bioethics. He has over one hundred publications including twenty-fi ve books. He has
served as editor of I llness, Crisis & Loss a nd for The Midwest Sociologist. He is a mem-
ber of the International Work Group on Dying, Death, and Bereavement, the Midwest
Sociological Society, the American Sociological Association, the International Sociologi-
cal Association, Phi Kappa Phi, and Great Plains Sociological Society, and the Association
of Death Education and Counseling. He served on the board of Directors of the National
Prison Hospice Association.
Praise for Children, Adolescents and Death
“ In this brilliantly researched book, the greatest experts have shared their skillfully
blended tools into a volume of readable, compelling, and penetrating insights.
What a magnifi cent contribution for all who are concerned with the grief experi-
ences of children and youth!”
—Rabbi Earl A. Grollman, DHL, DD, Author, T alking about
Death: A Dialogue between Parent and Child
“ When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. We’re all too ready, hungry
for this book of readily accessible resources and action plans to help support chil-
dren and ourselves in this current net-age fraught with disasters, man-made and
natural.”
—Sandra Bertman, PhD, FT, Author, F acing Death:
Images, Insights & Interventions; Grief and the
Healing Arts: Creativity as Therapy
“ This book provides a comprehensive look at the issues faced by bereaved chil-
dren and adolescents. It presents, in detail, what we know about grieving children,
as well as specifi c ways to facilitate their mourning process. There is something
here for everyone—bereaved parents, school personnel, mental health workers,
and all who are faced with the normative but often challenging behavior of griev-
ing kids. Readers can select from a potpourri of topics that pertain to their current
questions and interests.”
— J. William Worden, PhD, ABPP, Co-Director, Harvard
Child Bereavement Study, Author , Children &
Grief: When a Parent Dies
Children, Adolescents
and Death
Questions and Answers
Edited by Robert G. Stevenson
and Gerry R. Cox
First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Taylor & Francis
The right of Robert G. Stevenson and Gerry R. Cox to be identifi ed as the
authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
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trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-89503-922-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-89503-923-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-26623-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
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Contents
Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Charles A. Corr
SECTION 1
Knowledge of Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CHAPTER 1
Children and Death: What Do They Know and When Do
They Learn It? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Robert Stevenson
CHAPTER 2
Death Version 2016: How Children and Adolescents are Learning
and Grieving in Cyberspace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Illene Noppe Cupit and Olyvia Kuchta
CHAPTER 3
The Disenfranchised Grief of Children and Adolescents . . . . . . . . . . 37
Kenneth J. Doka
CHAPTER 4
Trauma and Grief in Early Life: A Model for Supporting Children,
Adolescents, and Their Families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Dianne McKissock
CHAPTER 5
Family Therapy and Traumatic Losses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Stephanie Rabenstein and Darcy Harris
SECTION 2
Coping with Death at Home and at School . . . . . . 89
CHAPTER 6
Children and Death: Coping through Humor, Art, and Music . . . . . . . 91
Gerry Cox
CHILDREN, ADOLESCENTS, AND DEATH
CHAPTER 7
“Oh, Those Poor Children!”: Borrowing Historical and Biographical
Loss Narratives of Grieving Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Harold Ivan Smith
CHAPTER 8
Child Development: An Existential Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Neil Thompson
CHAPTER 9
Children, Adolescents, and Catastrophic Loss: The Role of
Spiritual Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Peter Ford
CHAPTER 10
Helping Bereaved Children in the Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Linda Goldman
CHAPTER 11
A School Counselor’s Role in Bereavement Counseling . . . . . . . . . . 173
Arthur McCann
SECTION 3
Death and the Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
CHAPTER 12
Seasons of Love: Measuring a Child’s Life After Suicide . . . . . . . . . 189
Janet S. McCord and Rebecca S. Morse
CHAPTER 13
Dealing with Loss and Grief of Minority Children in an Urban Setting . . . 203
Fernando Cabrera and Robert Stevenson
CHAPTER 14
When a Grandparent Dies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Richard Gilbert
CHAPTER 15
Diffi cult Conversations: Children, Adolescents, and Death . . . . . . . . 235
Carolyn Cullen
CHAPTER 16
The Presence of Absence: The Struggle for Meaning in the
Death of a Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Robert A. Neimeyer and Wendy G. Lichtenthal
Appendix: Questions and Answers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
Foreword
Charles A. Corr
Sometimes it seems that we can never learn enough about children and adoles-
cents’ encounters with death, loss, grief, and mourning. Why is that? I think there
are several reasons, most of which have to do with failings on the part of the adults
who interact with children and adolescents. Here are fi ve such reasons for us to
ponder.
First, some adults appear to hold the view that children really do not have
encounters with death and loss early in their lives. This view is naïve and unreal-
istic. Loss is experienced by an infant as early as when a nipple is withdrawn dur-
ing breastfeeding or when adults turn away from a child to attend to other things
and the child begins to cry. Later in life, a pet might die or a favorite stuffed toy
might go missing. (In my experience during a lengthy career in teaching univer-
sity courses on death, dying, and bereavement, many college students have shown
a clear ability to offer vivid descriptions of their earliest childhood experiences
with death and loss, as well as about the adults who were or were not helpful in
such situations.) At any time in a child’s life, a parent or grandparent might die,
not to mention a friend or teacher. (Our children found the death of the janitor at
their school to be particularly signifi cant, because they knew him as the person
who helped them enter and leave school when the sidewalks were icy and he
replaced the light bulbs in a darkened and somewhat scary room.) In our society,
television and other media provide a daily diet of graphic (and often highly unre-
alistic) portraits of violence, war, and death. And even young children can often
show adults how they are connected to events around the globe through myriad
electronic devices that are capable of linking them to tragedy and sadness at the
touch of a button. Any youngster who can form an attachment (and that is eve-
ryone) can experience loss when or if that attachment is severed. Any adult who
believes children live in a world that is untouched by loss and death is imagining
a fantasy land unlike the real world of everyday life.
Second, despite all that we have learned, there still seem to be adults who
believe that, even if events involving death and loss actually do occur, children
(and perhaps early adolescents) are too innocent to have any real awareness of
p.vii
CHILDREN, ADOLESCENTS, AND DEATH
such events in their lives. If children don’t know about such events or are thought
to be unable to understand them, these adults seem to think there is no need to talk
with or educate such supposedly innocent youngsters about loss and sadness. The
problems with this mistaken adult view are twofold: (a) If we do not discuss such
events with young children, when will be the appropriate time to do so? When
will there ever be a magical moment when children will morph from complete
ignorance to at least some questions that betray a real need to know? (b) We
always need to be wary of interpretations of childhood that excuse adults from
having to engage with children on important matters of life and death because
such interpretations are typically self-serving in the ways they leave adults off the
hook from having to help real children in diffi cult situations.
Third, another reason why we as adults need to learn more about children and
their encounters with death and loss is because whatever the limits there may be in
children’s understandings of such events, children are almost always aware of the
emotional currents that surround them. Even if a child doesn’t fully understand
what is happening (and who of us ever does completely understand death-related
events?), he or she is likely to have a partial, often distorted, grasp of such events
and, more importantly, is likely to be sensitive to the emotional cues that adults
deliberately or unwittingly give out in such circumstances. When adults are upset,
crying, and making efforts to hide things from children, the children often sense
that something bad is happening. Indeed, what is happening must be a really bad
thing if it cannot be shared. And in the egocentric world of childhood, perhaps the
bad thing is the result of something the child did? In short, a child’s fears about the
unknown can often be more diffi cult to cope with than what is actually happening.
So, by failing to permit a child to be part of the events that are occurring in a fam-
ily or in a community (in an appropriate way, of course), adults may isolate the
child in a frightening world of self-doubt and scary speculation.
Fourth, one of the key responsibilities in development and maturation through-
out the life span is to come to know one’s own strengths and limitations and to
learn how to cope with the events of life. If we raise young children in a greenhouse
environment in which nothing diffi cult or challenging ever happens, how can we
expect them to develop effective coping skills that will serve them throughout
their later childhood and the remainder of their lives? There is a legitimate place
for protecting children from actual harm, but misguided protectionism reveals
obvious dangers. Children who are prevented from appropriate involvement in
events associated with loss will be stunted in their emotional or psychological
growth and will not have any practice in coping in the future with the unexpected
challenges that will inevitably confront them. In addition, they will likely come to
believe that they have no one to help them in meeting such challenges and no trust
that there are adults to whom they can turn for assistance. It is far better from an
early age to help children gradually develop effective coping skills in ways that
suit their developmental capacities, their needs, their personalities, and the actual
worlds in which they live.
p.viii
FOREWORD
Fifth, adults need to continue this supportive work for their children throughout
childhood and into adolescence and young adulthood. Adults may not realize that
it is we who locate youngsters in our families, our schools, and our communities.
As our youngsters continue to develop and gradually become more and more their
own persons, our level of infl uence over them typically lessens and alters. The
media, their peers, their life experiences, and the world around them all become
increasingly more infl uential. That does not mean, however, that there is no fur-
ther need to teach and support our offspring and members of younger generations.
We can continue to provide a constructive presence in their lives, whether as
parents or grandparents, teachers and school administrators, adults who work in
such professions as law enforcement and the media, or those who establish social
policy in our communities. To make these constructive contributions to children
and other young people, we always need to learn more about helping them under-
stand and cope better with death, loss, grief, and mourning.
In this volume, the editors have brought together a collection of chapters by
knowledgeable contributors that can assist adults, whether they are parents, com-
munity members, or professionals who work with children, to guide and support
youngsters in the ways that are needed in the 21st century. The need is great
because the issues are not just about death, dying, or bereavement; they are about
life and living, about how the young people we help today (or do not help) will
live out their lives. What we as adults need to do is to sensitize ourselves to the
different ways individual children experience and express their reactions to death
and loss, and to help such children lead more effective and more fulfi lling lives.
The chapters in this book can assist a variety of adults—especially parents, school
personnel, and healthcare providers—to engage in that work in more useful ways
in a variety of situations. We need not think of the contents of this book as dark
and scary—helping children to achieve their full potential in the face of signifi -
cant challenges is a rich and rewarding work.
p.ix