Helping families cope with the death of a child.

A NEW book on helping families deal with the death of a child warns against adhering too rigidly to the "stages of grief" model. A senior lecturer in nursing and midwifery at Otago Polytechnic, Alison Stewart, co-authored Sudden Death in Childhood: Support for the Bereaved Family, with British researcher Ann Dent. It was aimed mainly at nurses and midwives, who, the authors said, had a "unique and pivotal role" in supporting families.

Based on their doctoral research, the book argued that the way a person grieved was strongly influenced by the expectations of the people and society around them. However, grief was also intensely personal in nature, and therefore each individual experienced it quite differently.

"This means that some commonly held beliefs, such as the so-called 'stages of grief', may not only be inappropriate for many grieving Families, but can actually constrain grieving, as bereaved individuals wonder why their responses are not matching this pattern," Stewart said.

The most important thing the book did was offer a new range of ways of looking at grief that moved forward from the theorists of the mid to late 20th century, such as Colin Murray Parkes, Elisabeth Kubler Ross and William Worden, whose thinking on bereavement had strongly influenced health professionals, but whose work was sometimes misinterpreted, she said.

Recent practice and research had explored the ways that many people kept a continuing bond with the dead person rather than "getting over it". Working with family members could therefore often be about helping them find ways of living with the death.

The book--which pulls together writing front the fields of nursing, psychology and sociology--offered nurses and midwives "considerations for practice", as op posed to strict clinical guidelines or standards of best practice. It offered ways to help them recognise situations, have confidence in their judgment and to develop their existing skills in supporting and listening, and allowing families to tell their own stories.

Working with grieving people put a responsibility on health professionals to look at themselves and their own assumptions about grief, including the language they used to talk about it, Stewart said.