Coping strategies among Italian Christian parents bereaved of a child by road accident: A qualitative research

This article presents a case study on the death of a child in a road accident. Parental bereavement has extremely severe consequences; among them the persistence of negative thoughts focused on the tragic event, which is certainly a feature of serious major depression. Given rearing children is fundamentally important to the phases through which couples and families evolve and given that in such a context gender identities are part of processes of co-construction of relationships and roles that determine maturation both in men and women, the loss of a child inevitably produces a profound change of adult existential project because it questions the identity-parental aspect acquired by the couple in the act of procreation and in the willing acceptance of responsibility for their own children. Within the frame of Psychology of Loss, through the empirical detection of forms of existential project in a group of parents that survived their children, this article examines the factors that have a role in bereavement elaboration. Results highlight that the Christian Weltanschauung, in its bipolar expression between religious transcendence and lay culture (understood as ethics of care), is the substratum in which coping abilities for a positive loss elaboration are anchored.