5 Tweens and Teens 119increased sense of vulnerability and a desire for reunion with the sibling.
When personal growth was an outcome, it usually entailed increased resil-
iency in the form of optimism, maturity, and further development of a sense
of self along with increased “faith consciousness” (Hogan & DeSantis, 1996,
p. 244). The teens’ ongoing attachment (continuing bond) with their deceased
sibling included regrets, endeavors to understand the “whys” of the death,
and attempts to “catch up” by “updating” (p. 245) the sibling on events and
reaffirming the continuing importance of the deceased sibling.
Sibling death is surprisingly common, affecting nearly 8% of the U.S.
population before the age of 25 (Fletcher, Mailick, Song, & Wolfe, 2013). Yet,
the consequences of sibling death during childhood and adolescence have
not been researched as extensively as parental death or the death of a child
(Fletcher et al., 2013). In the sibling relationship, shared family history, similar
cohort influences, and tight environmental circumstances often lead to close
(or at least tightly entwined) connections. Fletcher et al. (2013) examined the
“spillover” effects on siblings who experienced the death of a sibling in child-
hood or adolescence and found that years of schooling are reduced with sub-
sequent increases in failure to finish high school, reduced earning capacity,
and increased teen pregnancy. Further, these effects are stronger for bereaved
sisters than for brothers. Fletcher et al. postulate three mechanisms for these
effects: the siblings’ own grief and school impairment, the families’ changed
structures and ability to support the surviving sibling, and the increase of
existential questions that may dampen motivation for achievement. The com-
bination of double jeopardy (the tendency to silence one’s expressions of grief
when they most need to be shared) and these lifetime socioeconomic effects
make it clear that grief workers play a role in helping adolescents process
their grief while at the same time helping them to stay on target with their
schooling.
Death of a Grandparent
Not infrequently, young children lose a grandparent, but with increasing lon-
gevity, this typical first family loss often comes during adolescence. Research
in New Zealand (Breheny, Stephens, & Spilsbury, 2013) traced how grandpar-
ents come to “be there” as the grandchildren are born and how this translates
into “being there” to provide child care/support and to develop ongoing
close relationships with the grandchildren as they age. Avoiding “interfer-
ence” and cultivating enjoyable relationships with the grandchildren was
described by the sampled grandparents as self-evident (they believed all
grandparents would enjoy such contact) and enjoyable. In the United States,
Scherrer (2010) traced how grandparents became some of the main support-
ers of adolescents grappling with out of the norm gender and sexual orienta-
tions, showing how intense the attachment between adolescents and their
grandparents can be.
Characterized by high levels of support and love and less emphasis
on regulation than in the parental role, these relationships are mourned
when grandparents die. A study of adolescents whose grandparents had
died within the prior 6 months (in Canada) showed that gender, time
since death, and number of deaths experienced had no significant impact
on death anxiety; the level of grief in response to the death was the only