Children’s Exposure to Sudden Traumatic Death: Bereavement, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the Case for Early Intervention

This chapter examines the specific area of the impact of sudden, unexpected tragedy and will focus on children’s reactions that are severe and difficult to manage. These reactions have been delineated by various authors as “distorted,” “complicated,” or “disabling”. T. Rando states that there are five risk factors associated with traumatic death that increase complications for mourners. Rando suggests that when death is traumatic, “violence, mutilation, or destruction” are the most complicating factors and differentiate this type of death from other types of sudden, unexpected death. Since children may require longer than adults to adapt to sudden traumatic death due to their lack of cognitive and emotional maturity and the impact of violence, mutilation, and destruction, they are less amenable to the structured critical incident stress group debriefing process commonly used with adults. Most interventions stress the need to reduce children’s use of avoidance and the need to help them identify strategies to effectively deal with future stress.