Death of a Loved One Doesn’t Always Make Children Vulnerable

I’ve been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a loose retelling of Charles Dicken’s David Copperfield. Both are tales full of loss and the many terrible challenges that a child growing up in poverty and surrounded by violence and addiction might experience. Both stories are fiction, but they remind of us of something quite profound (and, these days, sorely overlooked) about our children. They are far stronger and more capable of dealing with loss and change than we think.

Sadly, we are far too quick to see our children as vulnerable, anxious, and traumatized by every emotional slight and perceived challenge. There is, though, plenty of evidence that reminds us that our kids can and do cope with difficulties better than expected. The secret to their success is a combination of individual qualities, like a fiercely positive attitude towards the future, some personal talents that find expression, a network of people who maintain the child’s sense of social connectedness, and a healthy dose of childhood innocence.

Children are motivated to look for better. If we, as their caregivers, help them to experience the world as a place that is predictable and nurturing, then even the death of someone close, whether that is a friend or family member, needn’t be a catalyst for a mental health crisis.

There is an interesting piece of research that was published this year by Lucy Bowes and her colleagues at Oxford University. In their research, they estimate that as many as 3 out of 4 children will experience the death of a close family member before the age of 16. And yet, little is known about how children grieve and the long-term consequences of loss.

In a unique look at this, Bowes used longitudinal data from a birth cohort study of just over 9,000 children in the United Kingdom to see how a mother’s experience of the death of a close family member might affect the parent-child relationship and children’s own mental health. In other words, when there has been a death that is close to the child, are children likely to show emotional and behavioral problems afterward? The answer is “No,” which is a pleasant affirmation that our kids are able to cope with normal life stress far better than we think.

In Bowes’s study, even when a child’s mother reported bereavement, there was little, if any, chance of the child experiencing more depression or anxiety as they approached their later adolescence and early adulthood. In other words, families can be terribly disrupted, and while grief is a very real burden, it is not necessarily a traumatic event that disadvantages our children as they move toward independence.

On a personal note, I know this firsthand. My best friend died in a car accident when I was 19. The accident was not his fault but the fault of the other driver, who crossed the center line and crashed head-on into the car my friend was a passenger in. Tragic in so many ways and momentarily destabilizing for all of us who knew him, but the accident was not the source of longer-term mental health problems for any of my friend’s closest peers.

I was thinking about all this when my 21-year-old stepson’s friend died a few weeks ago in a housefire. I can imagine it is a shock and will create a complicated stew of emotions for him and the large social network that the young man was part of. But I know from both the research and personal experience that such a loss needn’t cause a complete emotional breakdown. At least, it doesn’t need to do so when the right supports are in place.

There will be some children who are more vulnerable and more likely to experience death as a traumatic event. I have seen them in my clinical practice over decades. But to assume that all children need a mental health intervention after someone close to them dies misunderstands the sources of our children’s resilience.

Professional help is just one of many resources we need to experience resilience. For most children, even those fictionalized by authors like Dickens and Kingsolver, there are self-righting mechanisms at play that keep children motivated to live their lives after loss. It’s in our children’s best interests to trust their capacity to heal rather than assuming that they are fragile.