L’engagement des adultes proches d’un enfant endeuillé par la perte d’un membre de sa fratrie : une recherche qualitative exploratoire

Abstract

Objective

The purpose of this research was to establish an overview of the social support provided by the adults to a bereaved child. The death of a sibling is a terrible experience for a child. Social support is an effective protective factor against the high risk of psychological distress. However, adults are reluctant to get involved because many do not know how to support a bereaved child. To date, few studies have looked at how to empower relatives to engage with the child.

Methodology

We conducted an exploratory inductive qualitative study. Seven adults who had been involved with a child experiencing the loss of a sibling participated in a cycle of three group workshops. An analysis by coding, categorizing, and relating the data set was conducted.

Results

The results identified four phenomena that lead adults to avoid dealing with the child's grief. These are grief anxiety, grief cognitions, feeling of legitimacy, and tendency to avoid. The way parents and child function also contributes to the barriers participants identified to engaging with the bereaved child.

Conclusions

Categorizing and relating the phenomena led to a better understanding and a new knowledge of the difficulties encountered by the adults around a bereaved child. Clinical and research perspectives emerged from our results, notably the identification of a reference person, the design of an inventory of the bereaved child's needs, and collaborative work between parents, child, and their relatives, in order to promote adult involvement and prevent psychosocial risks for the bereaved child.