Forming our grief rhythm: The relational window of tolerance for bereaved parents.

The shared loss of a child can present challenges to couple relationships as both partners attempt to cope with their own grief and their partner's grief. In this longitudinal qualitative study, five bereaved parent couples participated in 13 total interviews, revealing coregulatory interactions surrounding their shared loss. Using thematic coding and grounded theory analysis, their reflections were organized into three interrelated process themes: regulating self, regulating other, and forming our grief rhythm.

"It's Hard to Talk When Your Child Has a Life Threatening Illness": A Qualitative Study of Couples Whose Child Is Diagnosed With Cancer.

When parents are confronted with something as fundamental as a cancer diagnosis for their child, it is generally assumed that sharing the emotional impact of it, in the form of talking about it with the partner, is helpful and necessary to cope as an individual and a couple. However, couple communication in the context of childhood oncology is often challenging. In this qualitative research, we aimed for a better understanding of how partners experience their couple communication during treatment of their child.

"The child is our focus": On couple issues in child oncology treatment.

Objective: This study explored the perspectives of child oncology professionals and parents about the attention professionals should give to the parent couple relationship during treatment of the child.

Methods: We employed a qualitative research design, framed within the approach of consensual qualitative research (CQR), gathering data from four focus groups with 20 professionals and from nine in-depth interviews with 16 parents. Thematic analysis of the focus group and interview data was done with MaxQda software, using two coders and member checks to strengthen confidence in the analysis.

"We Hardly Ever Talk about It": Emotional Responsive Attunement in Couples after a Child's Death.

Within Western cultural traditions, the idea that parents should talk about the death of their child with each other is deeply rooted. However, across bereaved parent couples there are wide variations in communication about their grief with each other. In this study, we explored the experiences of bereaved couples related to the process of talking and not talking.

Toward Understanding the Child's Experience in the Process of Parentification: Young Adults' Reflections on Growing up With a Depressed Parent.

This article reports on a qualitative study with 21 young adults who grew up with a depressed parent. We examined how young adults make sense of their childhood experiences of parental depression and how their retrospective reflections help us to understand the experiences of children and the processes of parentification. Participants recounted that their childhood consisted mainly of actions in the service of family well-being.

"Cycling around an emotional core of sadness": emotion regulation in a couple after the loss of a child.

In contrast to the traditional view of working through grief by confronting it, recent theories have emphasized an oscillating process of confronting and avoiding the pain of loss. In this qualitative study, we sought a better understanding of this process by conducting a detailed case study of a bereaved couple after the loss of their infant daughter. We employed multiple data collection methods (using interviews and written feedback) and an intensive auditing process in our thematic analysis, with special attention to a recurrent metaphor used by this bereaved couple in describing their personal and relational experience.

The complexity of couple communication in bereavement: an illustrative case study.

Sharing grief experiences, or "storying"grief can be a key resource in adapting to loss, one that can contribute to stronger bonds and relational intimacy within the family. In this article, the authors conceptualize communication between grieving family members in terms of 3 "D" processes, emphasizing the extent to which such communication is dialectic, dialogic, and dynamic in nature. They illustrate the complexity of sharing about a mutual loss, focused on these 3 features, by referring to a case study of a couple coping with the death of a child in the context of a newly formed family.