Developmental Manifestations of Grief in Children and Adolescents: Caregivers as Key Grief Facilitators.

The death of a loved one represents one of the most distressing and potentially traumatic life events in childhood and adolescence. Grief reactions in youth are influenced by ongoing developmental processes and manifest differently depending on the child's age and developmental stage. These grief-related processes unfold within youths' caregiving context, as children and adolescents rely heavily on the adults in their environment to navigate and cope with the death of a loved one. Despite the field's increasing recognition of the potential for maladaptive grief reactions to impede functioning over time, few longitudinal research studies on childhood grief currently exist. In this article, we will (a) provide a brief overview of the childhood bereavement literature; (b) review the new DSM-5 and ICD-11 Prolonged Grief Disorder diagnostic criteria through a developmentally-informed lens; (c) describe how grief reactions manifest in children and adolescents of different ages through the lenses of multidimensional grief theory and relational developmental systems theory; (d) highlight key moderating factors that may influence grief in youth, and (e) discuss a primary moderating factor, the caregiving environment, and the potential mechanisms through which caregivers influence children's grief.

Implementation methodology from a social systems informatics and engineering perspective applied to a parenting training program.

OBJECTIVE: For implementation of an evidence-based program to be effective, efficient, and equitable across diverse populations, we propose that researchers adopt a systems approach that is often absent in efficacy studies. To this end, we describe how a computer-based monitoring system can support the delivery of the New Beginnings Program (NBP), a parent-focused evidence-based prevention program for divorcing parents. METHOD: We present NBP from a novel systems approach that incorporates social system informatics and engineering, both necessary when utilizing feedback loops, ubiquitous in implementation research and practice. Examples of two methodological challenges are presented: how to monitor implementation, and how to provide feedback by evaluating system-level changes due to implementation. RESULTS: We introduce and relate systems concepts to these two methodologic issues that are at the center of implementation methods. We explore how these system-level feedback loops address effectiveness, efficiency, and equity principles. These key principles are provided for designing an automated, low-burden, low-intrusive measurement system to aid fidelity monitoring and feedback that can be used in practice. DISCUSSION: As the COVID-19 pandemic now demands fewer face-to-face delivery systems, their replacement with more virtual systems for parent training interventions requires constructing new implementation measurement systems based on social system informatics approaches. These approaches include the automatic monitoring of quality and fidelity in parent training interventions. Finally, we present parallels of producing generalizable and local knowledge bridging systems science and engineering method. This comparison improves our understanding of system-level changes, facilitates a program's implementation, and produces knowledge for the field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).