ABSTRACT
The issue of children’s bereavement is largely beyond the scope of this book, but this chapter is included for two reasons. Unresolved issues around childhood grief can often impact on us as adults, and may affect how we cope with our lives later on. This may lie behind why some people at work react to bereavement, apparently purely in the present, in a way that may seem even to them particularly puzzling. Secondly, for many adults it is all too easy to ignore or underestimate what children are going through after a death in the family or the death of a friend. Even in a relatively protected country, like the UK, about 1% of children are bereaved of a parent every year, that is about 135,000 children. It is estimated that 20 babies a day die at or soon after birth and 9,000 young people a year die before they reach the age of 14 as a result of illness or accident. Many of these young people have siblings. Sister Frances Dominica, the founder of pioneering a childrens’ hospice in Oxford, subtitled her book based on that experience: ‘Helping parents to do things their way when their child dies’.1 That is an important principle of support for the grieving of any age, including, of course, children, as she makes clear.
