Abstract
BackgroundLosing a child tragically impacts the well-being and functioning of parents. With these effects extending beyond emotional, physical morbidity and compromising self-perceptions, appropriate, longitudinal, timely and personalised support is key to effective care of bereaved parents. However, in the absence of a comprehensive understanding of parental bereavement, effective support of bereaved parents remains suboptimal. To address this gap, we scrutinise prevailing data on the effects of a child’s death, aged 0–12 years, through the lens of the Ring Theory of Personhood (RToP).MethodsTo study prevailing accounts of bereaved parents following the death of a child, we adopt Krishna’s Systematic Evidence Based Approach (SEBA) to structure our Systematic Scoping Review (SSR in SEBA).ResultsThree thousand seventy-four abstracts were reviewed, 160 full text articles were evaluated, and 111 articles were included and analysed using thematic and content analysis. Four themes/categories were identified relating to the four rings of the RToP. Findings reveal that static concepts of protective and risk factors for grief are misplaced and that the support of healthcare professionals is key to assisting bereaved parents.ConclusionIn the absence of consistent support of bereaved parents, this study highlights the need for effective training of healthcare professionals, beginning with an appreciation that every aspect of an individual parent’s personhood is impacted by the loss of their child. Acknowledging grief as a complex, evolving and personalised process subjected to parental characteristics, settings, context and available support, this SSR in SEBA calls attention to effective nurturing of the relationship between parents and healthcare professionals, and suggests use of the RToP to assess and direct personalised, timely, specific support of parents in evolving conditions. We believe the findings of this review also call for further studies to support healthcare professionals as they journey with bereaved parents.
Highlights
Losing a child tragically impacts the well-being and functioning of parents
Some authors have suggested that such deep and diverse change may be framed as a change in the bereaved parent’s sense of self [19,20,21,22,23]. Such a posit finds support from Bartel [24]’s account of grieving families, MahatShamir [25]’s report on parental experiences following the loss of their child and Einarsdóttir [26]’s article on maternal grief. It is to this sense of disruption of a parent’s concept of personhood or “what makes ‘you’ you” [27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35] that we turn our attention to in order to better understand the impact of such loss, and to better direct timely, personalised, appropriate, holistic and longitudinal support to bereaved parents
Frei-Landau, Hasson-Ohayon [59] suggest that there are three manifestations of existential or divine struggles. They are: absence of divine struggle, an explicit divine struggle where the parent seeks explanations, and an implicit divine struggle where the parent does not discuss religiosity [61]. Understanding these states is critical to the provision of effective support, since there is no consistency as to how religious affiliations across cultures impact grief in parents
Summary
Losing a child tragically impacts the well-being and functioning of parents. With these effects extending beyond emotional, physical morbidity and compromising self-perceptions, appropriate, longitudinal, timely and personalised support is key to effective care of bereaved parents. Some authors have suggested that such deep and diverse change may be framed as a change in the bereaved parent’s sense of self [19,20,21,22,23] Such a posit finds support from Bartel [24]’s account of grieving families, MahatShamir [25]’s report on parental experiences following the loss of their child and Einarsdóttir [26]’s article on maternal grief. A review of current data on the effects of a child’s death on a parent through the lens of the Ring Theory of Personhood ( RToP) [27, 35] was carried out
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