Background: The death of a child is one of the most painful events a parent may experience. Bereaved parents are known to be at an increased risk for intense and prolonged grief responses such as Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD). More knowledge is needed to understand mothers’ and fathers’ experiences of their children’s disease trajectory and possible associations to prolonged grief in order to offer better support to grieving parents.

Objective: The aims of this study were to assess symptoms of PGD in bereaved mothers and fathers and to examine possible contributing factors to parent’s grief.

Methods: A Swedish population based survey including 133 mothers and 92 fathers who had lost a child to cancer 1-5 years previously. Bivariate and multiple regression analyses were conducted to assess the associations between prolonged grief and independent variables.

Results: Mothers had significantly higher PGD symptom levels than fathers. Suffering of mothers was associated with their child’s pain, anxiety and with not being able to talk within the family, whereas the suffering of fathers was associated with lack of information from health care staff and with the feeling of having too much responsibility in the care of the child.

Conclusions: Mothers and fathers reported differences in factors associated with their grief following the death of their child. The results suggest that mothers and fathers would benefit from different kinds of support during their child’s illness, which could be considered when developing pediatric palliative care practice.