Individual and systemic variables associated with prolonged grief and other emotional distress in bereaved children

Most children confronted with the death of a loved one do not experience persisting psychological problems. However, for some, acute grief reactions develop into prolonged grief disorder (PGD) and other mental health problems. Research findings suggest that bereavement outcomes in children are associated with negative cognitions and avoidant coping and with different parenting behaviours. However, knowledge about factors influencing grief in children is still limited and few studies have examined the relative impact of psychological (individual-level) variables and systemic (family-level) variables in affecting their responses to loss.

The aim of the current study was to examine the association of different bereavement outcomes in 8–18 year old children (including levels of self-rated PGD, depression, and posttraumatic stress (PTS)) with sociodemographic variables, individual-level variables (including negative cognitions and anxious and depressive avoidance), and family-level variables (including the severity of caregiver’s PGD, depression, and anxiety, and indices of parenting behaviours, rated both by children and by their caregivers). Questionnaire data were used from 159 children plus one of their caregivers, gathered as part of the pre-treatment assessment in a randomized controlled trial. Results showed that most of the children’s bereavement outcomes, including PGD severity and PTS severity, were associated with indices of negative cognitions and avoidance behaviours. Caregiver’s depression and anxiety showed a very small, yet significant, association with two children’s outcomes. Caregiver-rated reasoning/induction (one index of parenting behaviours) showed a small association with children’s PTS-related functional impairment.

Exploratory analyses indicated that the linkage between parenting behaviour and children’s outcomes may be moderated by whether the behaviour comes from father or mother. This is one of the first studies examining how individual cognitive behavioural variables plus the mental health of caregivers and indices of parenting may affect PGD and other outcomes in bereaved children. The findings provide tentative indications that individual and family-level variables influence these outcomes, albeit that more research is urgently needed.