ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1659628
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring Bereavement and Public Health: The Role of Family and Friend Caregivers in Community Well-BeingView all 7 articles
Reciprocal Regulation in Social Support Interactions between Bereaved Parents and their Potential Supporters: A Qualitative Study
Provisionally accepted
- Curtin University, Perth, Australia
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The death of a child represents one of life's most profound stressors, often resulting in long-term emotional dysregulation and the potential for mental health diagnoses. This qualitative study explores how bereaved parents experience informal social support attempts. Sixteen bereaved parents in Australia were recruited through social media and bereavement support networks and participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Reflexive thematic analysis was applied to interpret participant narratives, with data collection and analysis conducted iteratively. Findings revealed that potential support interactions were rarely neutral: they either offered grounding through perceived safety, or heightened distress through judgement or avoidance. Four overarching themes were developed: Societal Norms (The Western World), articulating societal bereavement norms; Bereaved Parents' Experiences (The Untethered World), describing bereaved parents' internal disruption of identity and coherence; Potential Support Providers' Perceived Experience (The Uncertain World), capturing perceptions of informal social support providers' uncertainty with providing support; and Quality of Interactions (The Precarious World), detailing how support interactions either alleviated or exacerbated bereaved parents' distress. A key mechanism, reciprocal regulation, was identified, whereby bereaved parents mirrored the emotional availability or avoidance of their potential support providers. The findings articulate the complexities of social support done well by affirming the importance of attunement. This study offers an expanded understanding of grief as a relationally co-regulated process and calls for improved grief literacy and societal support.
Keywords: grief, bereaved parents, Informal social support, Reciprocal Regulation, qualitative research
Received: 04 Jul 2025; Accepted: 08 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tognela, Breen and Rudaizky. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Josephine Tognela, Curtin University, Perth, Australia
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