Bereavement and Grief | Shottery St Andrew's CE Primary School

Bereavement and Grief

Grief is a natural response to the death of someone close. Everyone will experience grief in a unique and individual way.

It is, of course, a fundamental loss and adjustment for any child or young person to lose someone important to them – particularly a close family member. But with the right support most children and young people will be able to find a way to move forward.

There are no limits about how long grieving should last and what it should consist of; it is a process that everyone goes through while they adjust and begin to cope with life without the person who they have lost or who has died.

Sometimes, the trauma of the death can block the natural grieving process so that a child or young person becomes ‘stuck.’ This is known as traumatic bereavement.

Traumatic bereavement

In a traumatic bereavement, how the child of the young person experiences or understands the death – the meaning they make of it – results in it being experienced as traumatic.

Rather than the intensity of their feelings reducing, a child or young person who has experienced a traumatic bereavement may continue to struggle with overwhelming emotions that impact on day-to-day life.

A child or young person can experience traumatic bereavement at any age, and any type of death can result in a traumatic bereavement.

There are many factors which may make a bereavement more likely to be traumatic, including:

Neglect or abuse
Domestic or community violence
Loss of birth family
Poverty and deprivation
War or displacement
Neurodevelopmental or learning difficulties

Identifying the signs of traumatic bereavement

When a child or young person experiences the death of someone significant it is likely to be difficult – but it won’t necessarily be traumatic.

Children and young people, like adults, can experience a broad range of emotions when grieving. Although they can be intense and difficult to manage at times, typically the emotions do not impact everyday life persistently.

If the emotions do impact the child or young person’s everyday life, they may be experiencing traumatic bereavement. School staff may notice a student:

becoming withdrawn and isolating themselves from others
not participating in activities they used to enjoy
struggling to concentrate in class
having angry outbursts and shouting
feeling hopeless and not believing things will get better
increasing risk taking behaviours, like using drugs or alcohol or self-harming

These difficulties are likely to be persistent, frequent, severe and a change to the child or young person’s usual behaviour.

It is also important to consider the child or young person’s response to death in the context of their family culture, belief system and developmental stage.