Adolescent Grief: Developmental and Cultural Considerations
Grief, the multifaceted response to significant loss, affects individuals across the lifespan. Fortunately, research focusing on this area is burgeoning; however, much of it centers on adult grief, potentially leaving adolescent mourners disenfranchised and misunderstood. Adolescent grief is uniquely impacted by factors such as cognitive, emotional, and psychosocial development; risks and protective factors; embeddedness within multiple contexts, such as school, family and neighborhood; societal messages about who is allowed to mourn and in what ways; and family culture. Counselors working with adolescents need to understand the unique characteristics of adolescent grief, its influences, and ways to help facilitate healthy coping.
Participants will be able to:
- How the developmental context of adolescence intersects with grief to create a unique, specific response to loss
- How adolescents’ family culture impacts their experience and expression of grief.
- Other factors influencing adolescent grief (e.g., wider societal messages about grief and embeddedness within multiple contexts).
- Roles counselors can play in facilitating adaptive coping and positive meaning-making for grieving adolescents.
Laura S. Wheat,
Ph.D., NCC, LPC
Laura S. Wheat is assistant professor of counselor education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She coordinates the college’s Grief Outreach Initiative (GOI), a service learning opportunity for any student enrolled in the university, graduate or undergraduate, to provide one-on-one support and mentorship to a grieving K–12 student in the local school system. She is currently conducting outcome research on GOI activities and is working to implement a grief camp for children and adolescents. Dr. Wheat has worked as a school counselor in York, South Carolina, in addition to teaching in the counselor education programs at Winthrop University, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Augusta University, in Georgia. She has presented and published on grieving children and adolescents for the past nine years. She currently serves as a member of the board of directors of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC).
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