Parental Bereavement in Anglo American History

Contemporary bereaved parents who usually lack prior experience with the death of an infant or young child also lack understanding of how parents reacted in previous centuries when a child died. This article reviews social science writing on parental bereavement in Anglo-American history, concluding that parents as early as the early seventeenth century have left records of their grief. Cultural understanding and customs surrounding death have changed, and around 1800 women began to leave records of their grief in letters and diaries. Emotional expressiveness following infant death was greatest during the nineteenth century, but decreased toward the end of the century and became taboo in the twentieth. Compared to men's, expressions of grief by women and writings directed toward women have been more expressive of emotion. Relatively little has been written about parental bereavement in the early and mid-twentieth century.