64 Grief and Loss Across the Lifespan
and attuned caregiving continue (Coates & Gaensbauer, 2009), whereas older
children have more difficulty coping. Parental separations due to military
deployment provide information about children’s responses to separation
from, and loss of, loved ones. Infants and preschoolers have little sense of
time; past and present seem indistinguishable for most toddlers. Yet, separa-
tions require a sense of past (when the loved one was here), a sense of pres-
ent (when the loved one is missing) and a sense of future (when the loved
one will return). Time sense evolves in tandem with vocabulary to help the
toddler understand it, so until they can use such language and understand
time concepts, the separation of deployment (or illness) makes it challenging
for a toddler to understand separations from parents (Paley, Lester, & Mogil,
2013). Similarly, when infants’ or preverbal childrens’ beloved caregiver falls
ill and/or dies abruptly, they have no language with which to process this loss
and it appears unlikely that they have any concept of death to assist them in
understanding their feelings of loss. Developing language skills enable better
understanding of complex emotional experiences brought about by separation
or death.
Other empirical findings come from the “September 11, 2001, Mothers,
Infants, and Young Children Project” that studies families in which the father
died on September 11, 2001. The surviving parent’s degree of initial and ongo-
ing distress and her ability to cope were shown to mediate infants’, toddlers’,
and preschoolers’ grief responses (Markese, 2011). When a caregiver dies,
children in this age group are more likely to experience parent–child conflict,
behavioral problems, and externalizing behaviors as they grow (Markese,
2011). The most important intervention for these young children is to assist
the primary caregiver to remain attuned and responsive to the child and to
provide support and respite to enable that caregiver’s optimal functioning.Death of a Caregiver
Certainly the most detrimental loss a youngster may experience is the actual
death of the primary caregiver. The reading by Chris Michael (following the
Emerging Adults chapter) exemplifies how bereaved preverbal children have
difficulty as they grow finding words for the emotions and other experiences
they have after the death of a caregiver. After the loss of his father at age 3, he
still struggled in young adulthood to find the emotional vocabulary for his
loss. This is common when losses are not “revisited” with the child’s growing
emotional vocabulary and ability to reason at higher levels of abstraction.
There is general consensus that children under age 2 are not able to
understand death, particularly its finality, though they do experience sepa-
ration anxiety and exhibit reactions of protest and despair as observed by
Bowlby (1998, 2000). Research consistently associates parental death with
higher levels of psychopathology in bereaved children as they grow, though
more recent scholarship indicates that the responsiveness of the child’s
remaining caregiver and that person’s ability to provide safe and consis-
tent care is a better predictor of resilience or psychopathology than the mere
event of a parental death (Christ, 2000; Hope & Hodge, 2006; Silverman &
Worden, 2006).