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The Late Effects of Loss of Parents in Childhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

M. J. Gay  and
W. L. Tonge
M. J. Gay
Affiliation:
Royal Hospital for Sick Children, 3 Rillbank Terrace, Edinburgh
W. L. Tonge
Affiliation:
United Sheffield Hospitals, Sheffield
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Extract

The effect of loss of parents during childhood has been the subject of many studies. Although most reports agree that some emotional disturbance occurs in the child, it is not yet clear what are the late effects of such separations in adult psychiatric health and behaviour. Brown (1961) and Munro (1965) pointed out that childhood bereavement before the age of 15 is not a rare experience: both studies report an incidence of over 19 per cent, in non-psychiatric populations. While some studies (e.g. Brown, 1961) reported an increased frequency of bereavement in childhood in depressed patients, other studies (e.g. Hopkinson and Reed, 1966) failed to confirm this. Furthermore, as Ainsworth (1962) pointed out, the term “parental deprivation” requires careful definition. It can refer to insufficiency of parent-child interaction (which cannot be assumed to follow automatically in every separation, because of the presence of parent substitutes), to grief reactions which may be supposed to follow parental loss and predispose to depression (Bowlby, 1961) and to distortions of parent-child relationships. The psychological consequences of parental loss could be expected to differ according to the degree of pre-separation distortions of relationships.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 113 , Issue 500 , July 1967 , pp. 753 - 759
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1967 

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References

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