One of the biggest challenges facing parents who are grieving the loss of a child is the need to immediately provide parental care to the remaining siblings, reports a new book called Parenting After the Death of a Child: A Practitioner’s Guide.
"The challenge that parents face is this: In the midst of grief, how do you stop parenting the deceased child while you are simultaneously struggling to meet the parenting needs of the children who remain?" asks Dr. Stephen Fleming, a professor of psychology at York University and lead author of the book.
Through in-depth interviews with parents who had lost a child and had one or more surviving children, the authors found that rather than recovering from the loss, bereaved parents work to regenerate a sense of self and a sense of family.
"[Dads] go back to work, commit to working for the family, and they tend to overcome the fear of putting their children out into an unsafe world sooner than moms do," said Fleming. "Moms tend to be more intuitive grievers, more focused on internal feelings, and they have an almost paralyzing fear that if one child can die, another could die as well. So, often, moms are dragged back into parenting by the surviving children."