Grief and bereavement of preschool children

The article deals with questions connected with grief and bereavement in preschool age of childhood. The main monographs and articles on the problem of grief and bereavement in preschool childhood are reviewed in this text. The authors, analyzing the Russian and European tradition of research, mention that in Russian psychological literature there are almost no texts for parents and educators about child’s experience of grief. The authors point that existing articles do not clear the specific influence of children’s concept of death on the grief process. The accent in the article is put on the difference of loss acceptance depending on the age of a child and the specific of child’s death-concept. The peculiarities of different age periods among the preschool childhood age are viewed in the prism of death and loss. The authors pay attention on the dynamic of child’s grief depending on the expected and unexpected death of the beloved one. The variants of normal and pathological grief are described in the text of the article. The authors give recommendations concerning the normalization of child’s psycho-emotional condition in accordance with the peculiarities of the child’s grief. Special accent in the article is to the subject of psychological support of a child in the situation of announcement of death and possibility of child’s attendance to the funeral. Also there are recommendations to preschool educators about the psychological help to bereaved child and his/ her resocialization in the kindergarten.