Knowing the experience of primary school teachers in the face of a child’s mourning, in a school in the countryside in the Maresme

Abstract

Objective: Explore the teachers’ experience with a grieving child, identify their emotions in the face of death, learn about the difficulties in talking to children about death, and identify helpful strategies.
Method: Qualitative study of interpretative phenomenological design through a focus group of 9 participants, all of them teachers from a rural primary school in the Maresme region.
Results: The teachers report fear of the child’s reactions, not knowing how to act and how to face death at school. They feel helpless and transmit avoidance behaviors.
They live as an obstacle not knowing the information that the family has given to the suffering child, the taboo of death, the difficulty that results from not having done a previous personal work on death and the interpersonal plurality in relation to death.
Conclusions: The results show the need to implement training programs to increase knowledge in coping strategies in the face of death by teachers.