Childhood Traumatic Grief: A Multi-Site Empirical Examination of the Construct and its Correlates

Abstract

This study evaluated the construct of childhood traumatic grief (CTG) and its correlates through a multi-site assessment of 132 bereaved children and adolescents. Youth completed a new measure of the characteristics, attributions, and reactions to exposure to death (CARED), as well as measures of CTG, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anger. CTG was distinct from but highly correlated with PTSD, depression, and, to a lesser degree, anger. In contrast to a recent study of complicated grief, CTG severity was significantly associated with the degree to which the death was viewed as traumatic. CTG was also associated with caregivers' emotional reaction at the time of the death and caregivers' current sadness. Clinical implications and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Beyond Community Violence: Loss and Traumatic Grief in African American Elementary School Children

“…Studies of primarily parentally bereaved children, many receiving or seeking treatment, do not show significant gender differences in grief (Brown et al 2008;McLatchey et al 2009;Melhem et al 2007). However, a national study of adolescents found girls more likely to report the death of a friend or family member in the past year and gender differences in substance abuse, PTSD, and depression related to these losses (Rheingold et al 2004), with boys more likely to report substance use and girls higher in PTSD and depression.…”

“…Shared grief and bereavement in the immediate family may compromise caregivers' ability to provide a supportive and nurturing environment for the child's development in general and for working through their grief in particular. In a study of bereaving children and adolescents, caregiver and family reactions were strong predictors of CTG (Brown et al 2008), and this may be a more significant issue for single parent homes, which characterizes many urban neighborhoods.…”

“…growing interest in the study and treatment of childhood traumatic grief (CTG) (Brown et al 2008;Cohen et al 2004a;Pynoos et al 2008). CTG occurs when a child loses a loved one under what they perceive as traumatic circumstances, develops trauma symptoms, and is unable to complete the normal grieving process (Mannarino and Cohen 2011;Cohen et al 2006).…”

A Pilot Study of Physiological Reactivity in Children and Maternal Figures Who Lost Relatives in a Terrorist Attack

“…We did not compare data to a control sample of community residents who were not exposed, directly or indirectly, to the incident. To a large extent, measurement of traumatic grief (Prigerson & Jacobs, 2001) and childhood traumatic grief (e.g., Brown et al, 2008) have developed since our data were collected and thus we did not have the benefit of more sophisticated measures of the construct. Rather than measuring emotional attachment, our designation of closeness of the participants' loss assumed that loss of a mother or grandmother was more distressing than other losses.…”

“…An emerging literature has begun to address traumatic grief in children (Brown et al, 2008;Brown & Goodman, 2005;Cohen, Goodman, Brown, & Mannarino, 2004). For example, Brown and colleagues (2008) found childhood traumatic grief to be distinct from, but highly correlated with, PTSD symptoms, depression, and anger in children bereaved by the September 11 World Trade Center terrorist attacks.…”