Children’s Encounters with Death, Bereavement, and Coping

This book contains four parts: two opening chapters in Part I provide up-to-date background on childhood development and its intersection with death-related encounters in the United States and around the world. The initial chapter on children’s development will place issues of death and bereavement during childhood in the overall context of the physical, emotional, social, behavioral, spiritual, and cognitive changes over time that mark movement toward adolescence. The four chapters in Part II will examine all of the major ways in which children encounter death early in the 21st century: through accidents and homicide; suicide; HIV/AIDS; and, life-threatening illness. Part III will offer an overview of children’s grief, provide analyses of well-known types of childhood bereavement, and conclude with a detailed exploration of special issues associated with childhood bereavement arising from traumatic deaths. The eight chapters in Part IV will address a broad range of interventions designed to help children who are coping with death, loss, and bereavement.