Meeting the needs of parentally bereaved children: A model of child-centered parenting.

The experience of losing a parent during childhood has been well-documented to be a stressful and disruptive event in the life of a child. While there has been debate regarding the longterm outcomes of childhood parental loss, there is general agreement that how the surviving parent handles the death and its aftermath with the children will substantially influence the children's adaptation and coping. The current investigation explores, using both qualitative and quantitative methodology, the parenting of a sample of forty-one recently widowed individuals with children between the ages of six and sixteen years. Parents were interviewed extensively about their family's experience of the death, with a particular emphasis on their children's experiences. They also completed self-report measures of adjustment, parental confidence, grief experience, psychological symptomatology, and social support. Children completed a measure concerning their parents' parenting techniques. Using Grounded Theory analytic techniques, parents' narratives were analyzed in an attempt to gain an understanding of the challenging experience of parenting bereaved children in the face of one's own recent widow (er) hood. A model of child-centered parenting in situations of parental bereavement was developed from subjects' rich narratives. This model consisted of the following parenting categories: communication about information, communication about feelings, awareness/responsiveness to children's loss-related reactions and experiences, meaning-making with the child about death, facilitation of the child's ongoing relationship to the deceased parent, handling of the funeral services, handling the child's exposure to the deceased parent, provision of a stable environment after the death, and getting support for children. The relationship of the sample's child-centeredness to various mediating variables and measures of adjustment in the parents and children was explored. Variables that showed significant associations to child-centeredness dimensions included the sex of the surviving parent, whether the death was sudden or anticipated, the time since death, and the loss history of the surviving parent. In a number of categories, surviving mothers showed greater child-centeredness, particularly in areas pertaining to emotional engagement with children. Spouses who lost a spouse suddenly showed higher child-centeredness than individuals with anticipated spousal loss. Subjects' childhood experiences with death and significant separation proved to be predictive of greater child-centeredness in a number of parenting categories. The implications of the findings for clinical intervention with bereaved families are discussed, as are recommendations for further research. The study points to the need for models of parenting that take into account the multivariate aspects of parenting bereaved children.PhDClinical psychologyIndividual and family studiesPsychologySocial SciencesSocial psychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/131075/2/9825325.pd