Grief and Loss

As a school counselor, I deal with the issue of loss a lot with children of various ages. The most important thing to understand about children and death is that there is no timetable when it comes to dealing with death, they will face the loss in their own time. If your child is not displaying the signs of grief that you feel that they should be, it may be their brain protecting them from whatever they are not yet able to process. They may need time before they are ready to address the issue of their grief. Pushing them to deal with grief before they are ready, may have long lasting negative ramifications.


So how will you know when a child is ready to fully begin the grieving process? Unfortunately there isn’t a cookie cutter answer, but one sign may be when they start asking questions about the person who died or about the death itself. This is when you need to be ready to walk your child through the stages of grief. If your own pain is too fresh to be able to properly help your child, entrust a close friend or family member. Make sure that when you are picking this person that they share your same beliefs regarding death. If they do not, it may be necessary to pick someone else, in order to limit confusion and contradiction.

An understanding of Kubler-Ross Stages of Grief may help you understand your own grief, as well as help you with dealing with child’s grief. The five stages are: Denial (the “this is not happening“ phase), Anger, Bargaining (the “what I promise to do, if you can make this not happen” phase), Depression, and Acceptance. One thing to keep in mind about the stages of grief is that as you pass through the stages, they are fluid and you may find yourself or your children going back and forth through the stages for a period of time.

Death is not permanent for children before about the age of six. Children before the age of six (and sometimes even later depending on your child’s development) believe that the person who died will return to life again. This point was solidified with me when a family member, who was five at the time of his father’s death, told us that his dad was going to walk down the stairs from heaven and play a game with him later on that night. For this reason, it is very important to use words like death and died when referring to a loss. Using terms like loss, sleeping, or they are on a journey to heaven other euphemisms for death may confuse your child even more. The child may be left with the sense that the person who died needs to be found, that they will be coming back at some point, or they may begin to associate sleep with death.

Terms that we associate with a death are not terms children are familiar with. I have had to explain to children as old as eleven words like casket, funeral, memorial service, cremation and burial. These are terms that are thrown out often during a time following a death. We all experience fear of the unknown, and to many children these terms are unknown. Asking your child whether they understand what the terms you are using mean, can go a long way to relieving the anxiety that they may feel at this time. A little knowledge can make a big difference in the grieving process.

The Big Question????

I wish I had a dollar for each time a parent has consulted me about whether the child should go to the funeral home, or attend the funeral, I would be a very wealthy women. There is not an easy answer to this question. If you consulted ten professionals on this topic, you would get ten different answers. My belief is that you need to listen to what the child is saying that they need. An example of this was again with my nephew when his father died. He kept telling his mother that he needed to say goodbye to his father and he just wanted to hold his hand one more time. She believed strongly that he needed to be kept far from all of the grief at the funeral home and the burial. After some convincing she agreed to let him go to the funeral home with for ten minutes prior to everyone else showing up. When he got there, he sat right next to the casket talking and holding his dad’s hand. It allowed him to begin the healing process, by seeing his dad one last time.