A visual narrative analysis of children’s baby loss remembrance drawings

Abstract

Children experiencing the death of baby brother or sister have reported individual, familial, and communicative challenges. Siblings also have indicated that the loss of a baby in their family enriched their lives despite their pain. The present study extends this work by focusing not only on siblings but also other children enmeshed in the family system. Additionally, we heed the call for the use of arts-based methods in family communication by performing a visual narrative analysis of children's baby loss remembrance drawings. This analysis of 131 drawings completed by children ages zero to 18 yielded three main themes, including narration of identity, narration of life and death, and narration of growing sense-making. Two continua capture these themes, including the subject of narrativization and the mode of narrativization. In presenting these findings, we provide a unique (means of) understanding children's experience of baby loss in the family. The field of family communication studies was created with the goal of understanding the unique experiences of the family unit. However, though conceptions of family and the experiences of family members have become increasingly complicated, the methodological approaches family communication scholars use have remained relatively fixed (Droser, 2017; Suter, 2016). In line with the recently proposed critical family communication approach (see Suter, 2016), the current study begins to push the boundaries of what is considered within the purview of family communication studies by embracing a complicated and understudied topic-bereaved children's experience of the death of a baby in the family-and engaging a less traditional type of research method-visual narrative analysis. This work explicitly answers Faulkner's (2016) call for more arts-based research within the field. Through enacting a visual

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