Each year, two to three million children under 18 in the United States lose one or both parents. The loss of any important person in a child’s life, whether a parent, grandparent, sibling, or other close relative or caregiver, constitutes a profound loss and leaves a void that is both physical and psychological. The death of a parent may be the most stressful event a child can experience, given that parents are at the center of children’s worlds, especially during early and middle childhood.
When a parent dies, children need the help of adults to manage the practical, physical, and emotional aftershocks. However, the surviving adults in the home or in the family are also coping with their own grief and the sudden alteration of their life circumstances, which may require them to take on new roles and responsibilities.
If there is someone to hold children, physically and figuratively, as they reel from an incomprehensible loss, they are able to allow themselves the full range of their sadness, anger, fear, and hurt. They can be helped to understand and face the permanency of death. As the inevitable changes of life without that person unfold, caring and attentive adults can help them find reassurance and acceptance, a gradual lessening of the painful missing, and eventually the ability to find joy in a reorganized world.
Seven of the 20 former juvenile offenders I interviewed for my book, Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding About Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing, lost a parent early in life. None of them had the benefit of an adult who could respond to their experience of loss. They tried to go to school, get on with life, and manage their feelings, but they were fundamentally disrupted.
Their grief sat inside them, too painful to bear. They could not articulate what was eating at them, driving their drug use and delinquency, and everyone around them was caught up in trying to keep themselves and their families afloat. Grades and school attendance plummeted, and some turned to drugs before they were 12. Gangs offered a seeming connection and a family-like feeling they longed for.
Boys who lost their fathers looked for father figures. Their emotional vulnerability and the absence of a protective adult male were easily identified by predatory individuals, and some of the boys were groomed and sexually violated. These experiences added shame and distrust to their inner burdens.
Corey, one of my interviewees, served 31 years for robbery and murder. His father died suddenly of a heart attack when he was nine years old. Desperate for fatherly attention, he was drawn to a park ranger who victimized him sexually. His abuser introduced him to drugs and abandoned him one year later.
“I just wanted my dad and my family back. My schoolwork deteriorated after the molestation and the drugs started happening. I had been an A student up until then. I started to shoplift and steal. I got caught and had to go to continuation school. I was allowed to go back to regular school in ninth grade and lasted six weeks before I got expelled (for trading my Stevie Nicks T-shirt to a girl for some crank).”
It was years later, in prison, in a self-help group, that Corey found the safety and human connection he needed to unpack the feelings he had buried after losing his father. Even in that group, he could not bring himself to speak of the sexual abuse he experienced. Finally, 30 years after the fact, he was able to talk about it in a one-on-one meeting with a mentor in prison.
The loss of a parent is an earthquake in the life of a child. The emotional world of the family is profoundly shaken and will never again be precisely what it was before that death. The nature and extent of the damage may not be known for some time. This means that there needs to be not only first responders, but a kind of continuous attention to ongoing reactions.
Children will show us in behavior and actions what they cannot fully recognize or describe. They need someone to help them understand and give voice to their experience in all its variations and fluidity. If we help them give words and shape and meaning to what they are experiencing, it will be more easily carried and less likely to leak or erupt into actions that do harm to them and to others.
