Bereaved parents represent the worst fear of other adults. Consequently, they can often experience rejection and social disfranchisement. This is complicated by many in the mental health field who do not appreciate that parental bereavement is an exception to the general conceptualizations of grief and mourning. Each of the processes that are necessary to successfully accommodate a loss can be compromised by the dynamics of the loss of a child. Nevertheless, it is untrue to construe parental bereavement as inevitably leading to pathology or divorce.
Bereavement parents can and do survive.
However, they and those who seek to help them need to understand the dynamics and to appreciate how mourning will be different for this loss than for any other loss. They will need help in clarifying expectations for parental grief and mourning, adjusting the parental role, adjusting the marital relationship, utilizing or undertaking effective coping skills, and understanding the grief and mourning needs of surviving children. Parents will need support from those who understand the phenomenon of parental bereavement. Support groups devoted to bereaved parents can be particularly helpful in this regard. They will benefit from assistance with the major revisions of the assumptive world usually necessary after the loss of a child, being helped with communication, and enabling them to deal therapeutically with the process of family reorganization that needs to take place.