The Late Effects of Loss of Parents in Childhood

Abstract

The effect of loss of parents during childhood has been the subject of many studies. Although most reports agree that some emotional disturbance occurs in the child, it is not yet clear what are the late effects of such separations in adult psychiatric health and behaviour. Brown (1961) and Munro (1965) pointed out that childhood bereavement before the age of 15 is not a rare experience: both studies report an incidence of over 19 per cent, in non-psychiatric populations. While some studies (e.g. Brown, 1961) reported an increased frequency of bereavement in childhood in depressed patients, other studies (e.g. Hopkinson and Reed, 1966) failed to confirm this. Furthermore, as Ainsworth (1962) pointed out, the term “parental deprivation” requires careful definition. It can refer to insufficiency of parent-child interaction (which cannot be assumed to follow automatically in every separation, because of the presence of parent substitutes), to grief reactions which may be supposed to follow parental loss and predispose to depression (Bowlby, 1961) and to distortions of parent-child relationships. The psychological consequences of parental loss could be expected to differ according to the degree of pre-separation distortions of relationships.

Some Psychiatric Non-Sequelae of Childhood Bereavement

“…loss, particularly in female depressives, but no excess of maternal loss: however, their compari son series consists of psychiatric patients. Gay and Tonge (1967) find that the excess of parent loss is more frequent in psychogenic than in endogenous depression, but they do not make a comparison with normal controls. A number of workers have failed to find a significant association between parental be reavement and depressive illness.…”

Some marital and child‐rearing characteristics of early mother‐bereaved women

“…Death, though the most clear-cut of traumata, and therefore the easiest to study, is probably the least disturbing. Gay & Tonge (1967) demonstrated, for women only, a significant relationship between various forms of early parent separation and early marriage, though not between early parent death and early marriage. Langner & Michael (1 963) found that individuals whose parents had divorced or separated were twice as likely as those from unbroken homes to have marriages which also ended in divorce or separation.…”

“…In contrast, those who experienced early parent death showed only a slight increase in divorce rate. Gurin et al (1960) observed that 60 per cent of those from homes broken by divorce, who subsequently married, experienced problems in their marriage, and 34 per cent themselves became divorced. The percentages for those who were early bereaved were substantially lower.…”

Parental death in childhood and risk of adult depressive disorders: a review

“…One might also expect parental death to have a certain specificity for different types of depression. Gay & Tonge (1967), indeed, found the risk of parental' loss' (including separations) was greater in reactive than endogenous depressives. In contrast, Wilson et al (1967) found that bereaved depressive subjects had generally psychotic profiles on the MMPI, and that nonbereaved depressives had neurotic profiles.…”