THE LOOK of horror and shock on my nine-year-old son’s face when I had to explain that his dad had died is something I will never forget. There can be no experience like telling your child that their other parent is dead. As a parent, your instinct is to protect them from the pain, yet you have to hurt them in a way that is unimagin-able. When he cried, what I wanted to do was to soothe his heartache, to stop him from sobbing, to tell him that it would be all right.

But I was clueless about what to do next, how we could move on from that point. I was in no state to make my own way, let alone to know whether my son was going through the grieving process “normally”.

This was one of my biggest worries. His father died suddenly after a ruptured appendix on a Saturday and my son wanted to go back to school on the Tuesday. I was in a terrible quandary: it didn’t seem right to let him; surely a grieving child cannot cope with school? But at his insistence, I allowed him to go.

I knew I had done the right thing when he came home with the appearance that the day had offered some respite. Months later I learnt that getting back to routine “normality” was the thing that many children crave in such circumstances. But at the time there was no one to tell me this.

If there had been any help available, I would have been the obvious person to locate it. Three years ago, when my husband died, I was working for a young people’s substance misuse project. Trained in counselling techniques and with a “helping profession” background, I had extensive knowledge of the support agencies in place for young people. Yet when I wanted to find out what was available for me and my son, I drew a blank.

I did manage to find a Manchester-based child bereavement service, the Gaddum Centre, which offered counselling support — but they would see children only six months after the death, on the basis that at such an early stage children should be given a chance to go through a natural process of grief.

There wasn’t anything else, certainly nothing appropriate for a child of 9. Indeed, a report published last month by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that there is little support for bereaved children.

Between 4 and 7 per cent of young people lose a parent before they are 16 — a similar number suffer the death of a sibling — yet this terribly significant change goes largely ignored by professionals who could potentially help.

The report, Young People, Bereavement and Loss: Disruptive Transitions? was written by Jane Ribbens McCarthy with Julie Jessop. Ribbens McCarthy, a family sociologist at the Open University, also has personal experience of being the surviving parent, and says that she was shocked by the lack of research commissioned in the UK on the subject, especially as bereavement is often a factor when children begin to offend, experience difficulties with education or have mental health problems.

“Death is something that we don’t talk about as a society,” she says. “It is shrouded in privacy and many young people have insufficient opportunity to express their feelings about what has happened to them. Mainstream services, in particular, lack the provision to address the range of needs that bereaved children often have.”

A key issue for Ribbens McCarthy is that young people require a diverse range of help when they have suffered the death of a parent or other close relative, since they have many needs (for example, they may want just information, or be seeking therapy) and not all can be catered for within one type of service. Children also have different developmental needs and benefit from peer support, which adult services cannot cater for.

“There are deep divisions about how best to help bereaved children,” Ribbens McCarthy says. “Some researchers feel that children do not automatically need counselling or professional support, but many children may need help even if they don’t require assistance to resolve complicated grief.

“Also, the word ‘counselling’ causes confusion because it can mean many different things to different people, with a range of time scales, theoretical underpinnings and people offering it. This should not be considered as, or be, the only option.”

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