Family Intervention and Parental Involvement in the Facilitation of Mourning in a 4-Year-Old Boy

THE THEORETICAL CONTROVERSY SURROUNDING CHILDHOOD MOURNING includes some differing views regarding the necessary levels of cognitive and ego development which have to be achieved before mourning can occur. This is reflected in the contingent controversy over the age at which mourning can take place. It has been variously argued that mourning in children is possible from as early as 6 months (Klein, 1946); (Winnicott, 1954); (Bowlby, 1960), (1980), from 3½ to 4 years (A. Freud, 1960); (R. A. Furman, 1964), from 7 to 8 years (Anthony, 1973), or not until adolescence (Wolfenstein, 1966). In 1974 E. Furman argued that 2- to 3-year-olds appropriately guided and taught can mourn, and drew our attention to the mediating effect of the environment on the process of childhood mourning. It is now widely accepted that in bereaved families a surviving parent's unresolved mourning with its defensive behavioral consequences does interfere with a child's capacity to mourn.

There is strong evidence to support the belief that the circumstantial aspects of a bereavement can profoundly affect the family and thus the capacity of the surviving parent to help the grieving child to accept and integrate the reality of a parent's death and to adjust to life without him