Grief: Helping Parents with Grieving Children

Answers:
A. The three phases of adolescence are early adolescence, middle adolescence, and late adolescence.
B. The 6 common features of filicide are first children, aged less than 7 months, suffering from seizures or apnea, recent hospital discharge, time of death, and mothers who smoke.
C. The six signs of complicated mourning are continuous hyperactivity, ongoing and significant changes in performance, persistent regression, ongoing depression, self-destructive behavior and chronic anger.   
D. The fourth and fifth challenges of a grieving child are staying connected and resuming childhood. 
E. Coping strategies that can be used by stepfamilies with grieving children working on connections, learning about grief, honest communication, spending time separately or sharing struggles.
F. The three key concepts of death are "nonfunctionality" of the body, death is final and death is universal.  
G. (1) suicide and (2) murder.
H.  Four ways parents can introduce a child to an expected death are taking a death history, using correct language, reading about death with the child, and looking for death education opportunities. 
I. The second and third of the five challenges of a grieving child are understanding death and mourning death.
J. The six risk factors of complicated mourning are traumatic deaths, the caretaker is not functioning well, the child had a love-hate relationship with the deceased, the child experienced multiple losses, the deceased had an extensive illness, and the child has other mental health issues.
K. The four methods for reestablishing security are actively manage the level of change in the child’s life, actively increase the level of predictability in the child’s life, deal with any of the child’s health concerns, and increase the child’s feelings of control. 
L. Five points we considered regarding the terminally ill are whether or not the grieving child wants to visit the terminally ill, preparing the child for the visit, taking a gift, limiting time, and the benefits of involving a child in terminal illness.
M. Three topics we discussed regarding burials and cremation are how to explain a burial, how to explain a cremation, and spending time with a body prior to cremation. 
N. (1) funerals help children accept the reality of death, (2) what if the body isn’t presentable, (3) preparing a child for a funeral, and  (4) when not to take a child to a funeral

Answers
A.  Daughters experience greater levels of grief due to the central importance of relationships to a woman’s identity.
B.  One of the most damaging things that can be done is to send the child away to visit someone until the funeral and initial grieving process is over. This not only makes the child feel disenfranchised from the family unit, but also does not allow for a sense of understanding of death, even if that understanding is rudimentary. 
C. Children have difficulty understanding the third concept of non-functionality.
D. Children can misinterpret language at different developmental stages. The young child can misunderstand clichés associated with grieving, and these clichés can actually block the grieving process.
E.  Disenfranchised grief is used to refer to losses that cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned, or publicly mourned.
F.  A teacher
G.  The five core issues that must be addressed: emotionally separating from parents, developing a sense of mastery and control, establishing a sense of belonging, developing a positive self-image, and creating a sense of fairness and justice.
H.  She avoids facing ambivalent feelings towards the deceased mother, avoids facing memories of recent disagreements or anxieties of life without her, and structures her thoughts through concrete activities. A kind of symbiosis might be achieved whereby for a short time at least, both primary and secondary losses are compensated for by father and daughter concentrating on `restoring' their lives through keeping the family functioning. 
I.  (1) to accept the death of the loved one, (2) to uncover and endure the pain inherent in the grieving process, (3) to adapt to an environment in which the loved one is absent, and (4) to reconnect with the deceased in a way that the mourner is able to continue with life.
J.  Grief is normal, but if emotional or behavioral problems seem extreme, if they persist beyond six months, or if they interfere with any aspect of functioning, consider contacting a professional.
K.  (a) engaging in both life affirmation and death acknowledgment, (b) questioning and assuming different belief systems regarding death and the afterlife prior to settling onto a more permanent value system, and (c) incorporating the very reality of personal mortality into their evolving sense of identity.
L.  A child's egocentrism will cause continued need to validate his or her own thoughts. The impact of this thinking upon how a child of this age views death is an awareness of the finality of death and the fear of how the death personally affects her own life.