Journal of health research in community

Introduction and purpose: Children play a vital role in the family, and their death disrupts the family's balance. The unpleasant effects of death on family balance may remain for many years. The present study aimed to identify the damage caused by the child's bereavement on marital relationships and the quality of life of parents.
Methods: This study adopted a qualitative approach and an interpretative phenomenological model. Participants were parents who had lost their young son during the year 2023-2024 in Khorram Abad, Iran. The samples were selected using the purposive sampling method (n=16), and the sampling continued until data saturation was reached, at which point no new data were obtained. The qualitative research method used was a semi-structured interview. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim and analyzed using the Colizzi method.
Results: In this study, 4 main themes and 18 sub-themes were extracted. The main themes included: marital satisfaction, marital adjustment, quality of life, and marital intimacy, which were shown to decrease with the death of a child, and marital intimacy was high in some couples and low in others.
Conclusion: Considering the importance of children to parents, their death poses serious challenges to the parents' life system. The results of this study showed that the bereavement of a child has adverse effects on couples' marital relationships. It is concluded that these couples need therapy with family counselors to prevent family and marital harm and interventions to improve their marital relations and quality of life.