How Parents’ Words Shape Grieving Children’s Minds After Traumatic Loss

When a child loses someone they love in a sudden traffic accident, the emotional aftermath ripples far beyond the funeral. A new study from the Netherlands suggests that the way parents talk — and sometimes snap — at their grieving children may leave measurable fingerprints on the children’s mental health. Researchers at Utrecht University, together with colleagues at the University of Groningen and the University of Twente, found that parental criticism was strongly associated with higher levels of depression and posttraumatic stress symptoms in bereaved children, while parents who voiced positive appraisals about the loss had children who reported fewer depressive symptoms and a better quality of life. The work, published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, is among the first to combine parent questionnaires with direct observation of parent-child conversations about death, offering an unusually intimate window into how families navigate grief in real time.

The scientific backdrop is sobering. Road traffic accidents kill roughly 1.19 million people worldwide each year, and many of the bereaved are children. When a death is sudden and violent, childhood bereavement has been linked to long-lasting psychological consequences, including prolonged grief — a condition now formally recognized in the DSM-5-TR as prolonged grief disorder, marked by persistent separation distress, loneliness, and numbness that cause significant impairment at least six months after the loss in youths. Traumatic loss also elevates the risk of depression and posttraumatic stress symptoms. Yet while clinicians know that grieving happens within families, most research has focused on broad measures of positive parenting, such as warmth and consistent discipline. Far less attention has been paid to the darker corners of the family emotional climate — criticism, irritation, intrusiveness, and emotional coldness — or to the specific things parents say when they and their children sit down and talk about what happened.

The study team recruited twenty parent-child dyads from the Dutch TrafVic Kids project, which investigates the psychological consequences of losing a close person in a traffic accident. The children, aged eight to eighteen with a median age of 13.5, had all lost someone close — often a parent, in 55 percent of cases, or a sibling in a quarter of cases — at least six months before taking part. For the parents, who were overwhelmingly mothers, the loss was frequently that of a partner or even a child, meaning the adults were grieving deeply while trying to support their surviving children. Each child completed an online interview lasting up to ninety minutes, and then parent and child engaged together in a joint narrative task: a roughly twenty-minute, researcher-free conversation in which they discussed the moments before the death and answered prompts such as what they were thinking when they heard that the person had died.

To capture the family’s emotional climate, parents filled out the Level of Expressed Emotion questionnaire, a thirty-eight-item instrument assessing four dimensions: lack of emotional support, intrusiveness, irritation, and criticism. Expressed emotion, a concept long studied in families of people with severe mental illness, describes the overall emotional temperature of parent-child interactions; high expressed emotion means more hostility, criticism, and emotional over-involvement. Decades of work have tied high expressed emotion to mood and anxiety disorders in children, possibly because it acts as a chronic stressor that interacts with a child’s vulnerability and stress reactivity. In the crucible of traumatic bereavement — where children are already stressed and parents are juggling their own grief — the researchers suspected this climate might matter even more.

The loss-specific part of the study was more novel. Borrowing and adapting a coding scheme developed for children’s post-trauma conversations after emergency room visits, the researchers transcribed the twenty-minute conversations, broke parental speech into clause-sized units they called chunks — transcripts ranged from 133 to 1,214 chunks — and classified each chunk into four categories: promotion of avoidance, promotion of approach, negative appraisals, and positive appraisals. An avoidance promotion might sound like “We don’t have to talk about it”; approach promotion might be “Talking about it will help.” Negative appraisals included blaming the child or declaring that the family would never be the same again, while positive appraisals minimized threat, avoided blame, promoted autonomy, or framed change as temporary — for instance, praising how well the child coped. Two trained coders rated a quarter of the transcripts independently, with disagreements resolved through discussion, and reliability was quantified using Krippendorff’s alpha.

The children’s own outcomes were measured with validated instruments: the Traumatic Grief Inventory for Kids assessed prolonged grief according to DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 criteria; the PHQ-9 Modified for Teens measured depression; the Child PTSD Symptom Scale for DSM-5 captured posttraumatic stress; and the KIDSCREEN-27 gauged health-related quality of life across physical, mental, social, and school domains. The clinical picture in this community sample was concerning: fifteen percent of children met probable criteria for prolonged grief disorder, twenty percent for posttraumatic stress disorder, and thirty-five percent for probable major depression. Given the small sample, the team used Bayesian Kendall’s tau correlations, a non-parametric approach suited to small datasets that quantifies evidence for an association through Bayes factors — a value of three, for instance, means the alternative hypothesis is three times as likely as the null.

The headline finding centered on criticism. Parent-reported criticism showed strong positive associations with children’s depression and posttraumatic stress symptoms, each with a tau of 0.37 and Bayes factors around three, meaning the relationships were roughly three times more likely than not. The other expressed emotion dimensions — lack of emotional support, intrusiveness, and irritation — showed weak or negligible evidence of association. The researchers speculate that criticism may inflate the negative self-evaluations and self-blame characteristic of depression, likely through the internalization of negative self-related cognitions and impaired emotion regulation. Because depression and posttraumatic stress share features such as cognitive distortion and negative self-appraisal, criticism may fuel both. Interestingly, prolonged grief and quality of life appeared less sensitive to parental criticism, possibly — and speculatively — because children with profound grief remain so preoccupied with the lost person that other relationships, including with parents, recede in importance.

On the loss-specific side, positive appraisals stole the show. Parents who expressed relatively more positive appraisals during the conversation had children with lower depression scores and, strikingly, higher health-related quality of life — the latter association was strong, with a tau of 0.47 and a Bayes factor of nearly fourteen, meaning that relationship was about fourteen times more likely than no relationship at all. This fits with earlier work showing that caregivers’ positive emotional expression when reminiscing about the deceased is linked to lower depression and anxiety in children. The authors suggest that because depression involves dysregulation of positive affect, parents may help children upregulate positive emotions by focusing on affirmative thoughts about the lost person, consistent with the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Notably, positive appraisals showed no association with prolonged grief or posttraumatic stress — perhaps, the authors speculate, because for deeply grieving children, happy memories can evoke bittersweet pain.

Just as telling were the null results. Negative appraisals, avoidance promotion, and approach promotion showed no reliable links to children’s outcomes, though the authors caution that avoidance and approach responses were rare in the conversations, likely limiting statistical power. They also note that the coding scheme, adapted from a trauma-and-anxiety framework, may not capture grief-specific avoidance — which in prolonged grief can paradoxically masquerade as approach, such as repeatedly talking about the deceased to preserve a connection. Such continuing bonds can even serve an adaptive function by helping families construct meaning, making maladaptive patterns hard to spot from the outside. Deeply ingrained critical cognitions, meanwhile, may simply never surface in a twenty-minute task.

The team is careful about scope. The correlational design cannot establish causality — parental criticism and adolescent distress likely influence each other in both directions — and the small, Dutch, community sample with relatively low symptom levels limits generalizability. Two subscales of the expressed emotion measure had modest internal consistency, and no corrections for multiple testing were applied. Still, the implications are tangible. Bereavement support programs could help parents reflect on harsh communication and practice expressing positive loss-related appraisals, building on existing psychoeducational interventions for trauma-specific parent-child communication. Teachers and other supportive adults, the authors note, are well positioned to notice when families are struggling and to facilitate referral. And methodologically, the study makes a case for observation: self-reports of parenting are prone to bias, and watching how families actually talk about death may reveal what questionnaires cannot. If replicated in larger and more diverse samples, the message to grieving households is simple but powerful — criticism wounds, while a parent’s ability to find something positive in the wreckage of loss may quietly help a child heal.

Subject of Research: The relationship between parental expressed emotion, loss-specific parental responses, and children's psychological outcomes after traumatic bereavement

Article Title: The Role of Parental Expressed Emotion and Loss-Specific Parental Responses in Children’s Loss-Related Outcomes Following Traumatic Loss: A Mixed-Methods Observational Study

Article References: van Dijk, I., Lenferink, L. I., Asberg, L., de Keijser, J., & Boelen, P. A. (2026). The Role of Parental Expressed Emotion and Loss-Specific Parental Responses in Children’s Loss-Related Outcomes Following Traumatic Loss: A Mixed-Methods Observational Study. Journal of Child and Family Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-026-03380-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10826-026-03380-4

Keywords: parental criticism, expressed emotion, childhood bereavement, traumatic loss, prolonged grief, posttraumatic stress, depression, parent-child communication, health-related quality of life, traffic accidents, Bayesian analysis, observational methods