4 Elementary School–Aged Children 89
In a study of children’s physical and academic self-concepts while
mourning a family member’s death, Nguyen and Scott (2013) found that chil-
dren with higher physical self-concepts (defined as approving of one’s appear-
ance) experienced lower levels of depression after a loss. Unexpectedly, they
also found that children with a higher math self-concept had increased levels
of depression. They speculated that children with high math self-concept may
have higher expectations for achievement, and that falling achievement in the
aftermath of a family death can lead to depression.
Children from ages 6 through 11 tend to express sadness and grief in
intense yet rapidly alternating spurts, showing how dual process (Stroebe &
Schut, 1999) is at work somewhat differently in childhood. They may cry one
moment and be running around playing the next. They seem to modulate their
emotions by moving into distraction-mode more readily than older people.
Although unnerving to many adults, children resiliently oscillate from asking
serious and detailed questions about the death to giddy play within minutes,
a healthy and normal response for school-aged children.
Children in the 6- to 8-year-old group often speak about wanting to die
to be with the deceased as a form of wishful thinking about being with a loved
one, not as suicidal ideation (Christ, 2000). Children in this age range tend to
remember concrete characteristics such as hair and eye color and actions more
than personality or other abstract characteristics (Buchsbaum, 1996) and enjoy
talking about pleasant memories of the deceased (Christ, 2000). They benefit
from having concrete mementoes of the deceased.
Children in the 9- to 11-year-old range seem to have a stronger need for
factual information and tend to avoid direct expression of emotions, prefer-
ring to compartmentalize emotion or experience it very briefly or in private
(Christ, 2000). Occasionally, this may lead to aggression or withdrawal. On
the whole, children in this age group seem to benefit from interventions that
help them remember happier times and memories, obtain a transitional object
associated with the deceased, and affirm their tendency to move in and out of
emotion about the loss (Christ, 2000). Because memory acquisition and recall
are better developed by ages 9 to 11, these children remember abstract per-
sonal characteristics of the deceased. They miss characteristics and qualities of
the person, not just the care they received from that person (Buchsbaum, 1996).
Death Losses
Death of a Parent
The death of a parent, of course, is perhaps the most life-changing loss an
elementary school-aged child can experience. In Sweden, where national reg-
istries allow life-course analyses of an entire age cohort, Berg, Rostila, Saarela,
and Hjern (2014) found that parental death had a fairly immediate and signifi-
cant negative impact on school performance and grades. They theorized that
school performance mediates (directly influences outcomes) and moderates
(modifies the intensity of outcomes) adult outcomes for educational attain-
ment, substance use and other mental health disorders known to be associ-
ated with parental death in childhood. Berg et al. (2014) suggest that attention
