A Study of the Reactions of Nursery School Children to the Death of a Child's Mother

The reactions of a class of nursery school children, both as a group and as individuals, to the death of a classmate's mother have been presented. All of the children appeared initially to meet the trauma with defenses of denial and regression. Transitory separation anxieties and behavioral disturbances appeared to be universal. The move of one child to another city two months after the death occurred was an event that became confused with the death. It served to obscure and complicate the children's reactions to both events.

All of the children were told promptly (with the exception of Joe) and truthfully about the death by their own mothers. In response to their mothers' explanations all of the children (with the possible exception of Amy) were able to ask questions about what would happen to Wendy, the child who had suffered the loss. The children who appeared to achieve the most successful mastery of the trauma—with minimal anxiety and symptom formation—were able to take a second, very important step beyond considering how death could affect Wendy. They could also permit themselves to consider how death might touch their own lives. They could ask whether their own mothers, or they themselves, might die, and consequently they could verbalize both fact and fantasy in relation to themselves. (Each of these children, having already achieved some mastery of the facts about death through a previous death of a grandparent, was perhaps better prepared to cope with feelings about death when Wendy's mother died.) A second group of children relied "successfully" upon denial in order to prevent the idea of death from coming into contact with themselves. But even though they had minimal anxiety or symptoms, their denial prevented verbalization and mastery of their feelings about the traumatic experience. A third group also tried to use denial to keep death separate from their own lives. At times they denied any worry about death, but in periods of panic they seemed driven to verbalization of their anxiety about how death could touch their families or themselves. This verbalization, in the midst of panic, did not appear to be in the service of the ego's attempt to master the trauma. Both their denial and verbalization were "unsuccessful" for these children in that they developed marked anxiety and symptomatic