Infants who won’t sleep, toddlers who won’t comply and teenagers who won’t emerge from their bedrooms are trials that come with ordinary parenting. The death of a child is an event of a different order and one that for parents, results in higher depression, post-traumatic stress and prolonged grief symptoms than any other loss.
What Does this Mean for the Couple?
Child loss can have both detrimental and cohesive effects resulting in an overall higher divorce rate while producing stronger bonds for some. Poor marital quality before the loss and different and incongruent grieving styles put couples at greater risk while the death of a younger child with younger parents, surviving children, additional social supports, religious affiliation and shared meaning making are protective. Research suggests that relational resilience is supported by couples’ ability to respect their differences in how they grieve, while avoidance of emotional expression to protect the other from pain, is associated with an overall increase in both partners’ grief related distress.
However, as researchers, Barboza et al note, there appears to be a piece of the puzzle missing for although emotion suppression and grieving apart increases individual distress it is common and may be ‘appropriate or even necessary for relational adjustment despite its negative impact on individual well-being’.
A Study to Explore Co-regulation
The authors were curious to understand the interconnection of individual and relational resilience, noting that individual coping impacts the support offered to the partner while improvements in relational resilience and marital quality enhance individual well-being. They asked the question ‘Which comes first, or do these processes occur simultaneously?’
Five bereaved parent couples participated in a longitudinal qualitative study comprising thirteen interviews exploring coregulatory interactions over two years. The participants’ reflections were organised according to three process themes, ‘regulating self, regulating other, and forming our grief rhythm’.
Couple Co-regulation; Forming our Grief Rhythm
The study revealed that ‘bereaved parents are the best and the worst support for one another. They can provide each other resonance—a sense of shared grief—that no one else can. However, they must be able to regulate themselves enough to be in a position of support for their partner. Couples form a rhythm of interacting with one another to balance the demands of their individual grief process with the demands of their relationship. Over time, an unspoken but symphonic harmonization occurs between partners, which supports their individual and relational needs’.
Implications for Practitioners
Some couples need additional support as they develop an effective balance between their individual needs and that of the relationship. Understanding that this is a dynamic and recursive process that is practiced and refined over time, allows the practitioner to provide responsive care through the darkest possible event parents as a couple can experience.
Barboza, J., Seedall, R., Hooghe, A., Kaplow, J., & Bradshaw, S. (2024). Forming our grief rhythm: The relational window of tolerance for bereaved parents. Family Process, 00, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.13048
