ABSTRACT
Parents who had difficulty managing their grief, making sense of it, and finding any positive meaning in their baby’s death had the most troubled grief experience. Parents who had at least heard of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) before their baby’s death seemed to cope with it better. They also accepted it as the diagnosis sooner than those who had never heard of it. Parents who dealt with knowledgeable medical professionals who did a good job of explaining SIDS did better than parents who received vague or incorrect information about SIDS. This finding suggests that time and effort spent educating medical professionals about the SIDS-related research and about how to explain SIDS to parents is important. The amount of time and energy some parents dedicate to the work of organizations like the Canadian Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths at the local level is impressive.
