Children and Bereavement

A number of students have recently made enquiries about childhood bereavement, so today's post should give you some ideas of where you can find information on this topic.

There are a number of organisations devoted to providing support in this area. The Childhood Bereavement Network, Winston's Wish and Cruse all have websites with information about their work, suggestions for resources which you may find useful, and links to other similar sites. The NHS also has a bereavement area on its Live Well site, some of which is relevant to children and young people.

If you need something something a little more 'academic', you should really take a look at a couple of research reports written by the Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre in 2011. Childhood Bereavement: A Rapid Literature Review is a short overview of the topic and will give you plenty of ideas for further reading, while Long-Term Impact of Childhood Bereavement looks at data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. Or for something more succinct, try the executive summary of The Impact of Bereavement and Loss on Young People, a 2005 project from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, or a 2002 paper from Barnardo's entitled A Review of Sibling Bereavement.

And some short articles you might find useful: the BBC Health site has a piece entitled How Bereavement Affects Children, Teaching Times has published Counselling for Kids, and in 2007 Early Years Update published Managing Loss, Grief & Bereavement.