Studies in childhood bereavement.

A group of child psychoanalysts, associated with the Cleveland Center for Research in Child Development and the Hanna Perkins Therapeutic Nursery School and Kindergarten, studied 23 children who had lost a parent through death. These children varied greatly in socio-economic, religious, racial and ethnic background and had suffered bereavement at different points in their development, as early as a few weeks old and as late as 13 years of age. The majority were in individual psychoanalytic treatment, seen 5 times weekly over several years. Some were treated by way of the parent while attending the Hanna Perkins Therapeutic School. The research group compared and discussed the multitude of data with a view to understanding mourning and the effects of bereavement on the personality, with a view to developing techniques in assisting children and families cope with the stress, and with a view to developing some prophylactic measures to minimize pathological resolutions. The results of the research were published in "A Child's Parent Dies" (1). This paper focuses on sharing those findings which might be helpful to the clinician in the assessment of bereaved patients and in assisting them and their families in the crucial period of parental loss or shortly following it.