ABSTRACT
The parents were unanimous in acknowledging differences in their parenting of surviving children. As a mother stated:
Yes. I think it has [changed parenting]. It’s probably had a fairly profound effect … there is a different way of dealing with your children after you’ve lost one of them. (Isabelle, 2-year-old child died, one surviving child)
We will illustrate how the dual tasks of parenting and grieving intersect and inform one another by discussing the immediate demand to parent surviving children, the various levels of parental functioning in response to the child’s death, and the mothers’ strategies of concealing their anguish.
