5 Tweens and Teens 117“adult,” (something they may assume includes little emotional expression). In
this sense, teens are said to experience “double jeopardy” (Oltjenbruns, 1996).
Again, Michael’s reading at the end of this chapter shows how teens may
inhibit their own emotional expression to protect surviving parents and oth-
ers. They often feel compelled to hide their emotional reactions to loss, yet they
are deprived of support for processing their loss because they refrain from let-
ting others know about their thoughts and feelings. Other times, rather than
protecting others, teens seem to believe that expressing emotions openly, or
requesting support, would indicate that they are not yet fully adult. The more
insecure they feel about their maturity, the more reluctant they are to share
their vulnerabilities and distress (Rowling, 2002). Research indicates that par-
ents and teachers interpret adolescents’ silence to mean that adolescents are
not feeling the intensity of the loss in adult ways, and they then tend not to
validate the feelings of adolescents (Pfefferbaum et al., 1999). It is a vicious
circle: adolescents avoid discussion with the very people who may be able to
help them, and the adults interpret their silence to mean that the tween/teen
does not need support.
Rask et al. (2002) report that only about a third of their sample of ado-
lescents received significant support from friends and family. Rask et al. also
noted that participants reported fears of death, loneliness, and other thoughts
that hindered their ability to process their grief. They hesitated to tell others of
these challenges to mourning and meaning-making. This implies that interac-
tion with adults, whether trained grief counselors or empathic school staff and/
or attentive parents, will be beneficial for adolescents after a significant loss. If
adolescents are feeling these challenges but also stifling the expression of their
own grief, it is incumbent on the adults who care for them to gently draw them
out and explore their fears. A startling finding in Rask et al.’s study was the
report by teens that when a friend died, others offered little or no support.
Rask et al. (2002) found that the teens were more interested in support
from a mutual aid group than in “therapy” as such. Although adolescents may
hesitate to share their grief openly, they do seem to benefit from interventions
that draw them out with the use of symbolic material such as writing song
lyrics or creating artwork (Cinzia et al., 2014). Having bereaved teens (later
in their bereavement) help to facilitate the group is quite effective. The adult
functions to arrange a safe place for the group to gather, to assure confidential-
ity is understood, and to help the student facilitators with planning.
Death of a Parent
The death of a parent not only inspires feelings of loss, but affects adolescents’
family structure, economic security, and life plans (Cinzia et al., 2014). Initial
responses to the loss often entail not only sadness but significant fear/ anxiety
about how the surviving members of the family will continue to function (par-
ticularly economically) as well as a heightened sense of vulnerability to other
losses. Cinzia et al.’s (2014) review of studies of parentally bereaved adoles-
cents shows that teens’ academic performance suffers in the year following
the death and they often have intrusive thoughts about the parent’s death.
Adolescents seem to need to process both the time immediately preceding the
death as well as the aftermath, but differ in their interest in being part of the