Key Moments Child’S Future At Risk During A Time Of Loss How Adults Assist Kids In Dealing With Grief Is Crucial To Their Well-Being

Children work hard every day to make sense of their lives. Though they might not be aware of it, in their minds they continually draft the “narratives” that organize their worlds.

“We are all stories made flesh,” explains Dr. Lynne Williams, a Spokane child psychiatrist.

Children who experience a big loss — divorce, death or abuse — must figure out complex narratives. Divorced parents force children to add complicated chapters to their stories, such as living in two houses, and add new characters, such as stepparents. A parent’s death forces a child to end a chapter that was supposed to continue well into the future. And abuse means betrayal, the cruelest plot line of all.

A profound loss puts children at risk of physical and emotional problems throughout adulthood. How adults guide children through their grief is crucial to their long-term health. Caring and intelligent adults use the loss to teach kids that although life is unfair and sometimes tragic, they can survive.

But adults who ignore or exacerbate the loss condemn children to replay the trauma over and over. Grief remaining from childhood can manifest itself in the body; some chronic ailments, such as headaches and digestive problems, have been tied to unresolved grief.

Divorce, death and abuse are not the only losses children can suffer. Disabled kids, or those who lose brothers or sisters, face a hard road to adult life.

Children who do not receive help face two serious risks: writing the same sad script into their own life stories or blocking the painful plot line out of their minds entirely. That’s why some abused children grow up to be abusers, and some children of divorce fear commitment.

A Spokane woman named Nancy was 14 when she watched her father pack his bags. “I can’t live with your mom anymore,” he told her.

Nancy was shocked, and her life was changed. In high school, she felt possessive of her boyfriends and clung to girlfriends. “I was terrified of abandonment.”

To get out of the unhappy house, she married at 19. Scarred by her parents’ divorce, she vowed never to leave her marriage. But now, at 45, she’s divorcing the man she thought she’d be with forever.

Nancy recently took part in Change Point, a program sponsored by the Community Colleges of Spokane. It’s open to women in transition due to divorce or the death or disability of a spouse.

Change Point students wrote about how early losses have affected them as adults. They shared their stories but asked that only their first names be published.

When parents split, the initial emotional disruption for children lasts nine to 18 months, researchers say. Like Nancy, most children never see divorce coming — even if their parents fight a lot.

“Children are born of one unit,” says Spokane psychologist Phyllis Mast. “They perceive mom and dad as one thing. Kids believe that their parents will never divorce. When they do, it’s devastating.”

Children of divorce need to talk with others about the trauma, yet their parents often are too distraught to listen. So divorcing parents should welcome help from the extended family, churches, schools and support groups.

Psychologist and author Judith Wallerstein tracked two dozen children of divorce for 25 years. Certain problems appear right away for children, she discovered. They lose daily contact with the non-custodial parent. They lose quality time with the exhausted parent at home. They can lose familiar homes, pets, neighborhoods, communities.

If the children split their lives between two homes, they lose simplicity. They pack and unpack frequently, keep two schedules, two sets of household rules.

Half of the children Wallerstein studied struggled with severe alcohol and drug abuse in their early teens. Other researchers found that adolescents in divorced homes were more than twice as likely to run away, vandalize property and shoplift compared with children in intact homes, even those in “distressed” marriages.

“We used to think that kids are better off when (unhappy) parents divorce,” says Gary Woods, program supervisor with Casey Family Partners of Spokane. “We thought if the parents are happier, the kids will be, too. Now we know that no matter which parent the child ended up with, they were always in the mode of grieving the other parent.”

Marriage counselors, church leaders and child advocates are no longer afraid to question the divorce “solution” for couples, especially those with young children.

“Divorce is not always the road to health,” says psychologist Mast. “Barring criminal or otherwise anti-social behavior, try to work things out, get help. It is much easier to get a divorce, to find a new spouse. But you are teaching your kids that when something doesn’t work out, you bail.”

Nancy’s mother allowed her only limited contact with her father. Nancy missed him terribly, and searched for father figures. She hoped to be a nurse but didn’t do well in school. “I felt stupid and inadequate,” she says.

Looking at the children of divorce in their 30s, Wallerstein found that most in her study didn’t go to college, had difficulty settling into professions and married late, if at all, because they feared commitment.

Nearly four out of 10 marriages end in divorce, and 60 percent of divorcing couples have children. One million children a year experience divorce.

About 95 percent of those who divorce will marry again, often blending children and stepchildren. Remarriage does little to heal a child’s grief. And it often piles up more losses. An oldest child, for instance, might forfeit that position to older stepchildren moving into the house. The difficulties of blending families is one reason that 75 percent of second marriages also end in divorce.

Yet divorce can offer the best hope for long-term mental health for children in homes where parents beat and verbally abuse each other — unless the problem continues in the next household.

And many children of divorce have grown up just fine. Much depends on how well adults minimize the damage in their children’s lives.

Nancy, hoping to spare her children the trauma she has experienced, encourages them to spend time with their father. Still, she feels guilty about her divorce. “Abandonment,” she says, “has been the major word in my life.”

In the months following the deaths of his wife, his mother and daughter in the same car accident, Jerry Sittser realized he could collapse or he could get up each morning, send his children off to school and go to work. He could cry openly and allow his children to grieve in their own ways.

He could accept help from friends at Whitworth College, where he is a religion professor. He could let his children know that losing a mother is not a normal part of a child’s narrative. Mothers are supposed to grow older, clap at your graduation, cry at your wedding, be present at the births of grandchildren. Mothers are not supposed to be killed on the highway by a drunken driver.

“You don’t get over it,” Sittser tells his children. “You mature through it.”

It has been almost nine years since the accident, and Sittser’s children — ages 10 to 17 — are thriving. But he works hard to make certain they do not become emotional fatalities.

Long-term studies show that children who have lost a parent are at greater risk of physical ailments, chronic depression and anxiety disorders as they mature into adulthood. Children often express grief through stomachaches, headaches, insomnia, loss of appetite. Adults must intervene or the physical symptoms can evolve into serious adult disorders such as anorexia, migraines, digestive tract problems, ulcers and chronic back pain.

Adults who have lost parents when young go to doctors more frequently. One study followed a group of ninth-graders into their 30s and concluded that “children with earlier loss were more susceptible to serious medical illnesses than were control subjects.”

The Hospice Foundation of America reports that bereavement in early childhood often is a primary cause of depression and suicide attempts later in life. In her book “Grief, Dying, and Death,” Therese Rando writes: “When a person is unable to complete a mourning task in childhood, he may be haunted throughout his life with sadness.”

And if children are heaped with responsibility after a parent’s death, early worry can evolve into acute anxiety disorders. Susan, a 44-year-old Change Point participant, was 15 when her mother died of cancer. She assumed cleaning and cooking chores, and she didn’t have adults to turn to with her worries. “The grown-ups did not understand me,” she says.

Susan, dogged with depression, is a chronic worrier. So if she meets a young person who has lost a parent, she says, “If you need someone to talk to, I’m here.”

The physical and emotional remains of unresolved grief translate into lost potential for individuals and society. Chronically sick adults miss work, and burden the health care system. And sad, depressed parents sometimes don’t bond with their own children.

To help a child grieve, the surviving parent must weave the dead parent into the child’s continuing narrative. Sittser and his children often imagine what their mother would do in certain situations, such as at soccer matches.

“If we are good storytellers,” he says, “we can let the person live on.”

Some of the women and men who appear in Spokane County’s drug court have lost everything to drugs. Good jobs, marriages, children — all gone. Superior Court Judge Tari Eitzen often asks them why. And often the answer is abuse. Somewhere in their childhood, an adult beat, neglected or sexually abused them.

“They use drugs to blot out the memory,” Eitzen says.

Child abuse violates the natural order. Adults are meant to protect, not harm. The message abused children receive? No one can be trusted.

So it’s no surprise that abused children often land in prison as adults. About one in 20 men and one in four women prisoners nationwide had been sexually abused before age 18. These are self-reported cases; experts believe the numbers are much higher, but sex abuse is often kept secret.

One theory says children raised in abusive homes think it’s the norm. Often unconsciously, those children in adulthood will replay the narrative they grew up with. So an abused boy can grow up to abuse women. And girls who have been beaten by their parents sometimes beat or verbally abuse their own children or marry men who do.

Sandie, a Change Point participant, was taken out of her mother’s home when she was 2 due to neglect. Her dad was a drunk, she says, and her mother took her children to work with her at a bar and was reported. Sandie then lived in several foster homes — some “were neglectful and abusive. Some were kind and understanding,” she says.

As a young adult, Sandie neglected herself by moving at least two dozen times. She made no commitments to jobs, people, communities. Then she married, had four children and decided they deserved the stability she never had.

Adults like Sandie are not doomed to repeat their parents’ life scripts. They can rewrite them by coming to terms with the loss. Sandie has remained in Spokane for 11 years, raising her children and working on her emotional health. The urge to run remains. “But I fight it,” she says.

Sandie’s determination is creating a new and healthier script for her children.