Helping Bereaved Parents

This book provides a concise, yet comprehensive guide to effective work with bereaved parents, combining a broad overview of current research, theory, and practice with the authors' own extensive clinical experience. Transcripts of individual, couple, and group meetings illustrate the delicate subtleties of this work, giving the reader helpful insights into more effective clinical practice. The authors emphasize the importance of approaching each parent as a unique person, while also considering the socio-cultural context of the bereaved. This book helps clinicians approach work with bereaved parents with a less scripted format, suggesting an alternative role as expert companion to the bereaved, allowing for a more uplifting experience for both parties.

"This book does what it promises. It offers a useful, state-of-the-field, sensitive guide to assisting parents mourning the death of a child. Helping Bereaved Parents is stocked with sound theory, wise insights, sharp clinical practices, and useful resources. It deserves a place on every clinician's desk." -- Kenneth J. Doka, Senior Consultant, The Hospice Foundation of America"To me, the most inspiring 'take-home message' of this compact clinical guidebook is the recognition that traveling through the landscape of loss changes both bereaved parents and those professionals who journey beside them...Tedeschi and Calhoun have clearly traveled this terrain and found these treasures, and have had the generosity to share them with us." -- Robert A. Neimeyer, Ph.D., Series Editor, and author of Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping, from the foreword"A wise and useful guide to clinical work with bereaved parents. Among the many strengths of this book are the model of clinician as expert companion, the discussions of growth and of religion and spirituality, and the approach to bereavement as something other than pathology." -- Paul C. Rosenblatt, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Family Social Sciences, University of Minnesota; author, Parent Grief: Narratives of Loss and RelationshipIn Tragedy's Wake: Counseling the Bereaved Parent"...the book represents a significant contribution to the field of bereavement care.", "I was particularly struck by the authors' balance between acknowledging what research can tell us whilst accepting the individual differences which might be encountered in practice...They recommend a stance which they call 'expert companionship' which blends human compassion with a degree of expertise that may not be available from friends and relatives: 'expertise is woven into your interactions, rather than revealed through knowledge'." - David Trickey, Chartered Clinical Psychologist in BereavementCare, Vol. 25, No.1.

Richard G. Tedeschi is a Clinical psychologist and Professor of Psychology at UNC Charlotte. With Dr. Calhoun, he is the author of books and articles on post traumatic growth. He has been in clinical practice for 25 years, and is on the staff of KinderMourn, an agency that serves bereaved families in Charlotte.Lawrence G. Calhoun is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at UNC Charlotte. He has been a clinician for more than 30 years and his clinical work has been devoted to helping persons cope with anxiety, depression, and highly stressful events. His research has been focused on the responses of persons to trauma and other major life crises.