Focusing on relationships between children's behavioral responses and family characteristics, this exploratory, descriptive, and retrospective study investigated bereaved children's responses to the death of a sibling from cancer and examines those responses in relationship to selected individual, situational, and environmental characteristics. Participating in the study were 34 two-parent families from the United States and Canada who had had a child die from cancer within 3 years from the time of data collection and who had a surviving child between 6 and 16 years of age. The Child Behavior Checklist was used to measure behavior problems and competencies reported for bereaved children, and the Family Environment Scale was used to assess dimensions of family social climate. Content analysis of interview data preceded the coding of all data for quantitative analysis. It was found that internalizing and externalizing behaviors correlated negatively with social status, whereas social competence correlated positively with social status. Both internalizing and externalizing behaviors were related negatively to family cohesion, and lower internalizing scores were related to intellectual/cultural orientation, active/recreational orientation, and moral/religious emphasis. Implications of the results were pointed out for nurses who work with children and families in situations of long term illness and death. (RH)