The Routledge International Handbook of Child and Adolescent Grief in Contemporary Contexts

Book excerpt: This volume presents the leading research in child and adolescent grief from a diverse and global perspective, focusing on the systemic, political, and cultural processes that have a direct bearing on the way youth experience loss and grief. Carrie Traher and Lauren J. Breen bring together a global community of academics, practitioners, and social activists to discuss and address the complexity of lived experiences of grief for young people today. Presented in four parts, the contributors begin by providing a theoretical overview of youth, grief, and bereavement, before moving onto other important topics, such as suicide bereavement, the trauma of war, digital grief narratives, child soldiering, and more. Within each chapter, authors address contemporary theoretical frameworks, research findings, and praxis related to both death and non-death losses, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental grief, and grief on the internet and social media. Including contributors from a range of countries and from various disciplines, such as educators, health care professionals, policy makers, and advocates, the themes of coping, resilience, and growth are central and interwoven in each chapter. This handbook is essential for researchers, clinicians, scholars, educators, parents, and activists as to the most pressing societal and global issues that affect youth grief today and to provide context to their personal and professional interactions with youth. Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.