Near the beginning of this answer we made reference to events outside the child. Clearly from the work listed above these have an obvious bearing on stress in children and adolescents, and are events that by and large are outside their locus of control. One such event is bereavement, which can strike at any age. A baby will have no conception of death, but will become anxious if it has become used to a main carer, who is suddenly no longer there. A pre-school child might target blame onto themselves, working on the principle that the parent has gone away due to their behaviour, especially in a household where they may have been told that a parent will not come back until they improve their behaviour. These children can show their stress by becoming fretful and not sleeping properly and may resort to more immature behaviour. It has been noted that children tend to fall ill after a death, an indicator that they are suffering from stress. Holmes and Rahe, on their Life Change Index rate a bereavement at 100 for a spouse and 63 for a close relative, and whilst there is no scale available for children it must be assumed that they would score at least the maximum on the adult scale. Hence it is easy to see why they do tend to fall ill. It appears that children are beginning to recognise the permanency of death from around the age of five or six. Where one parent has died, it is common for the child to transfer all their affection onto the survivor, and to become very protective. There will be extreme cases where one parent will have suffered a violent death at the hands of the other; an event that may have been witnessed by the child. Such an occurrence must surely be most stressful and it is likely that the child will suffer from post traumatic stress disorder.

It is believed to be important that the child be interviewed a few days after the event and encouraged to recall as much detail as possible by drawing, playing and talking about the incident. The intention here is to make the child feel that the event is outside them and in some way allows them to grieve normally instead of internalising any blame. Any trauma, such as the events in Dunblane in Scotland, and in the USA where very young children witnessed the shootings of adults and teachers, is certain to have an effect on those present and their families, which may last throughout their lives.

Hence any method which can reduce stress at the time and later, is worthy of consideration. It may be useful in the attempted alleviation of stress for the child to be introduced to picture books and stories where characters have undergone similar trauma and emerged unscathed. This aspect of didacticism in children's literature can be important in the construction or redefinition of reality in the child's world. One study showed how important it is in reduction of stress in the case of a child's mother having died, for the school to be sensitive to the grief shown by the child. It is perhaps best in cases of a parent having died, for the child to have stress reduced gradually until the pain of the death becomes a distant, but not forgotten memory.