ABSTRACT
The death of a primary caregiver is never a natural and anticipated incident from a child’s point of view, even though it may be perceived as “natural” and “anticipated” from adults’ perspectives or in a medical assessment. As a result, losing a caregiver can be highly stressful and have devastating effects on the child’s life. While young children are generally perceived as more vulnerable to such stressors, adolescents are not exempt from the distress and struggles resulting from the loss of their main caregiver. At the same time, there is no child who is too young to grieve for such a significant loss because “grief does not focus on one’s ability to ‘understand’ but instead upon one’s ability to ‘feel.’ Therefore, any child mature enough to love is mature enough to grieve”.
