The prevalence of childhood bereavement in Scotland and its relationship with disadvantage: the significance of a public health approach to death, dying and bereavement

Abstract

Background and Method: There is an absence of research on the prevalence of bereavement during early childhood and the relationship between childhood bereavement and socioeconomic status (SES) and this poses a challenge in both understanding and supporting children’s bereavement experiences. Using longitudinal data from the Growing Up in Scotland study, which tracks the lives of three nationally representative cohorts of children, this paper aimed to address these gaps in research. It specifically drew on data from Birth Cohort 1 to document the recorded bereavements of 2,815 children who completed all 8 sweeps of data collection, from age 10 months to 10 years. Findings: The study found that 50.8% of all children are bereaved of a parent, sibling, grandparent or other close family member by age 8 and this rises to 62% by age 10. The most common death experienced was that of a grandparent or other close relative. The study also found that children born into the lowest income households are at greater risk of being bereaved of a parent or sibling than those born into the highest income households. Discussion and Conclusion: Given the prevalence of childhood bereavement and its relationship with disadvantage, this paper argues that there is an important need to understand bereavement as a universal issue that is affected by the social conditions in which a child becomes bereaved, as well as an individual experience potentially requiring specialist support. This paper thus seeks to position childhood bereavement more firmly within the public health approach to palliative and bereavement care discourse and contends that doing so provides a unique and comprehensive opportunity to better understand and holistically respond to the experience of bereavement during childhood.

A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy of Grief Interventions for Anxiety and Depression in Young People

“…However, these were synthesized in the narrative review. Where possible, within-group effect sizes (Cohen's d) were extracted from the papers; if unavailable, they were calculated using the available statistics (e.g., pre/post means and SDs) 2 .…”

“…Standard errors for these effect sizes were calculated using the N of the intervention group only, to be consistent with the within-groups effect sizes from the other studies 2. As few studies reported pre and post-test correlations between outcomes, r = 0.5 was substituted in for the calculation of the standard error for each effect size.…”

The price of loss – how childhood bereavement impacts education

“…Høeg et al (2019) did not find that socioeconomic status or psychiatric illness in the family had an influence on the significantly lower attainment rates among bereaved children. However, a Scottish cohort study (Paul & Vaswani, 2020) including 2,815 children found that children born into the lowest income households had a greater risk of losing a parent or sibling than children born into high-income households. Berg et al (2014) found bereaved children to be at increased risk of lower grades and school failure but were able to attribute such difficulties to preexisting socio-economic disadvantages and psychosocial problems in the family.…”

Bereavement and educational outcomes in children and young people: A systematic review

“…Children from poor families are at higher risk of experiencing bereavement (Paul & Vaswani, 2020), with parental death between two and five times more common among low versus high socioeconomic households and twice as common among adolescents of racial minority backgrounds (Feigelman et al, 2017). Thyden et al (2020) found that whilst 4.2% of white youth had experienced a death in the family, in contrast, 8.3% of Blacks, 9.1% of Asians and 13.8% of Native Americans had experienced family bereavement.…”