Supporting Your Grieving Child

Take Care of Yourself

Grieving a significant loss is a complex process for adults and children, because grief can affect our emotions, bodies, thoughts, behavior, relationships, and spirituality. Given the demanding nature of grief, parents and caregivers find it challenging to take care of all the needs of a grieving family, including their own needs. While it may feel natural for adults to focus on children, you will be better able to clearly see and respond to your child's needs if you also attend to your own grief. By honoring your own unique grief, you teach your child that grief is normal and that healing is possible. If you feel overwhelmed by the demands of your own grief, it is important to seek support for yourself.

Help Your Child to Understand

Death is hard to understand. Children will understand death differently as they grow. Your child may not understand what it means to be dead, why people die, the permanence of death, or the reality that everyone will die. Adults sometimes assume that a child who does not understand death is unaware of death. In reality, children often encounter the subject of death and think about death more than adults realize. Even when older children and teens begin naturally to understand these concepts, they need adult input and help to make sense of death in their lives. Ask your child or teen to share with you what they understand about the death. When answering a child's questions, use simple, honest, and concrete language to explain death. Avoid confusing euphemisms, such as “passed away” or “sleeping” to explain death. Several helpful children's books provide examples of such explanations, and reading with your child can help to begin conversations about this topic.

Adults often worry about how much to tell children about a death. Providing children with honest information is important, because lying to a child or excluding them from the truth can isolate and confuse the child, undermining the child's trust in the important adults in their lives. Depending on the circumstances of the death, it may be important to balance honesty with sensitivity to the particular child's ability to understand and cope with the information. If this is of concern for you, seek out the support of a professional with knowledge about children's grief to explore your options.

Allow Your Child To Express Grief

A child's grief expression usually appears different from that of adults. With more limited language skills, a child will be less likely than an adult to talk about the complex experience of grief. Children often move quickly from one feeling to another. For example, a child may cry for a short time and then play happily. Adults may misinterpret such behavior, believing that the child's sadness was not real. Grief is often expressed indirectly through a child's behavior. Sometimes a child will temporarily revert to old behaviors that they had outgrown, such as a return to bedwetting, an increased need for physical comfort, or increased anxiety about separation from caregivers. Sometimes children express grief through an abundance of physical energy, irritability, tantrums, head or stomachaches, poor sleep, poor appetite, difficulty concentrating, or difficulty getting along with peers. A child may experience heightened fears and worries, such as worry about the death of another family member, worry about their own death, or worry that they did something to cause the death. Because they will gain new abilities to think, feel, and communicate about a loss at each phase of their development, children revisit important losses and use the new tools they have to understand the loss. For example, younger children may process their grief largely through play, while teens may turn more to their peers for support, but the principles involved in healing through grief are similar regardless of age.

Strategies for Supporting Your Child Now and In the Future