Nine-year-old Peter saw his father collapse and die at the airport as they were on their way home from Lanzarote. The image now etched on his mind distresses him so profoundly that he has difficulty concentrating at school. He is sad and misses his father unbearably. At school he feels no-one notices or understands him, and he wants to blow up the whole school. His mother is battling depression so he has to cope on his own.

Peter’s story is not unique. Every year 3,000 children in Denmark suffer the death of one or both of their parents, a brother or a sister. Since 1999, many children have received help from the Egmont Foundation’s youth counseling center, Løvehjerte, to deal with their grief.

“Over the past 10 years we’ve helped more than 1,600 children and their families move on with their lives after a bereavement, and we find that there is a real need for our counseling,” explains Eva Helweg, psychologist and project manager at Løvehjerte.

Neither the social nor the healthcare services in Denmark offer any appreciable help for this sizable group of afflicted children. According to Eva Helweg this is mainly attributable to insufficient knowledge about the grieving process in children.

The Egmont Foundation in Norway
To supplement Løvehjerte’s clinical work with research, the Egmont Foundation has donated a grant of DKK 8.8 million to finance the establishment of a new research center at the Center for Crisis Psychology in Bergen. The center will bear Egmont’s name and be called “Bereavement center – a research project supported by the Egmont Foundation”.

Neither has the Norwegian government focused great attention on bereavement, probably because bereavement is not yet an accepted diagnosis in the psychological world. Therefore, until 2011, when the diagnosis “prolonged grief” may be added to the diagnostic catalogue, it is up to private charitable bodies like the Egmont Foundation to support research projects of this nature.

“It’s natural for the Egmont Foundation to support a project in Norway because Egmont generates a major portion of its revenue here,” says Grethe Nymark, project coordinator at the Egmont Foundation’s Aid and Grants Administration.

Grief is not a life sentence
The bereavement center is headed up by psychologist Atle Dyregrov and sociologist Kari Dyregrov. “The explosive research of the past 15 years has given us a good understanding of the bereavement process in adults, but there has been surprisingly little in the children’s field,” says Atle.

We are focusing so intensely on grief in children because of its long-term consequences: “Complicated grief can have a lifelong effect on children. They may have problems relating to and trusting other people. But at the same time I must stress that bereavement does not have to be debilitating. You are not condemned to a life of problems if you lose someone, but it’s important that children and adults alike know how to handle their grief,” says Atle, emphasizing that it is easier for children to learn coping strategies than for adults.

Atle is passionately committed to his work with grief and bereavement, both personally and professionally. He lost his own mother at the age of 19, but does not think psychologists should mix their professional and personal motives. “Like all other researchers, I want to understand. But we shouldn’t understand just for the sake of understanding – we must use our understanding to help others,” he says.

The broader health perspective is a key element of the bereavement center’s work. More information will enable parents and other relatives to give their children better bereavement support.

A project with international dimensions
Although the project is based in Norway, the results can be applied far beyond the Scandinavian borders. On his worldwide lecture tours, Atle has met people who have found his earlier books very useful. Through the Center for Crisis Psychology, he has worked to develop manuals for use when major disasters strike or as an aid to families who have survived war or disasters and must endure the extreme, sudden trauma of their complete and collective loss.

“In my experience, we are more alike than unalike across borders when it comes to grief,” says Atle. He also sees obvious potential for working with Løvehjerte and making use of the clinical experience accumulated by the Danish project over the past decade.