Supporting Children Through Grief
by Loren Talbot and Janine Jordison
Children experience grief just like adults do–the difference is how they do it. Prior to the pandemic, an estimated 5.2 million children in the United States experienced the death of a parent or sibling before their eighteenth birthday, according to Judi’s House/JAG Institute, a community-based non-profit bereavement center for children and families in Denver, Colorado. Recent public health research published in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) indicates an additional 37,000 children lost a parent to COVID-19 in the first year of the crisis. “Development, environment, and individual differences all play a significant factor in how a child grieves. Grief directly relates to the developmental stage of the child and the communication level of the parent and child.” says Kevin Carter, the clinical director of Uplift Center for Grieving Children in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “You may have four children. They will have four different relationships with the deceased, and they are going to have four different ways of handling it.” Since parents and other closely connected adults may witness different behaviors even among children from the same family, they need to recognize the variety of signs that children are grieving.
Child grief specialists speak about the “spurts or ping-pong nature” of how youth grieve, meaning that they experience their grief one moment and the next they can be laughing and playing. Adults often misinterpret the ease with which a child can move into play as a sign that they aren’t grieving. As children confront their grief, some signs may include: stomach aches, acting withdrawn, disorganized, impulsive, clinginess, attention seeking, control issues, loss of interest in activities, difficulty sleeping, attachment/detachment issues, sudden fear that they will die or someone else will, and frustration and anger to name a few.
Dr. Alan Wolfelt, founder of The Center for Loss and Transition in Fort Collins, Colorado, makes this distinction between grief and mourning: “Grief is your thoughts and feelings inside, where mourning is the shared social response. It’s grief gone public and children developmentally teach you more about their grief through their behaviors than they do through their words.” Wolfelt goes on to share “The reason we refer to them as forgotten mourners is that they’re grieving, but the question is, do they mourn? So if adults around them don’t understand how kids use behaviors to mourn, they often miss the cues…We know that bereaved children are at risk for being disenfranchised or forgotten, so we need to as adults understand how children and grief teach us.”
Parents or caregivers often want to protect children from the pain they may experience from a death and the grief that follows it. Their own personal fears around these subjects and their underlying assumption that children grieve the same way adults do–or perhaps that they don’t grieve at all–can lead to many missed opportunities. It is important to create environments for children and allow for whatever may surface in their lives.
The Dougy Center in Portland, Oregon is one of the visionary organizations whose mission has driven the creation of shared spaces for children to grieve together. The center was founded in 1982 by Beverly Chappell. After an inspiring connection with a young boy named Dougy Turno who had an inoperable brain tumor, Beverly started the first peer grief support groups for children in her home. Their model has grown and the Dougy Center has since expanded to three centers, developed programs in over 500 cities nationally and internationally, and offers grief training workshops. Resources are available not only by age, but around subject matter such as death by suicide, family illness, and violence.
Their facilitated grief peer groups are designated for children (as young as 3) and teens, young adults, as well as for parents, caregivers, and those living with a serious illness. “Each time an individual may hit a new developmental milestone, they revisit their grief in all new ways, with (new) cognitive capacities and new understandings of life.” says Jana DeCristofaro, the Community Response Program Coordinator and host of Dougy Center’s podcast, Grief Out Loud. “As kids start to get older they realize ‘okay, I got it. People die, they don’t come back, but what really happened to the body?’ You start to get more of those detailed questions…but you also see kids start to get more selective about who they start to tell that their person has died because they have become socialized.” Being in a peer group allows for these questions to be nurtured and addressed. Creating a healthy relationship with grief, death and dying as a child can help them carry their loss through their life into their adult years. DeCristofaro emphasizes, “The way kids grieve reverberates throughout their lifetime.”
Supporting children through the death of someone close directly correlates to the child’s success as an adult. “Understanding people’s reactions to the child’s grief responses across time also shapes how they (the bereaved) respond across time.” shares Dr. Tashel Bordere, assistant professor in the Dept. of Human Development and Family Science at the Univ. of Missouri-Columbia. Dr. Bordere, whose focus is on Black youth and young adults, goes on to state, “We know that bereaved children from all backgrounds are under-acknowledged and are at risk of being penalized around normal grief reactions. That amount of discipline is exacerbated for children of color…When your loss is not only unrecognized, but penalized you can end up internalizing these messages and mislabeling your own grief…I call this suffocated grief.” For Black and Latino youth, this suffocated grief and a misguided cycle of discipline can create a loss of life-long opportunities due to missed academic experiences, difficult social relationships, and peer isolation.
When it is time to answer questions, it is important to know that parents and caregivers may not have all the answers and that is ok. “A lot of times the shame and stigma and the fear that we have as adults, we transmit that to kids,” says Dr. Micki Burns, Chief Client Officer of Judi’s House/JAG Institute. “When we are afraid to talk about it or use words like dying, death, or funeral…we sometimes do more harm than good. The euphemisms we use in our world like ‘We lost them’ –well if I am a three-year old and you lost my mom, you better go find her!…The words we use to help ease into the conversation, make it often difficult for kids to grasp what’s going on.”
Death is a normal process of life that needs to be clearly explained at a level that is cognitively age appropriate. It is also important to recognize that the spaces that we seek to create for grieving children, may be best created with the child. “We have to investigate for ourselves and for children what safety looks like,” says Kevin Carter. “The biggest thing that adults need to do right now is to not declare safe space.” Knowing what safety looks like for a child and identifying the support network needed for them will look different for each individual.
As this catastrophic moment of increased death due to COVID-19 is reverberating throughout all communities, it is important to acknowledge both the individual loss for many children, as well as the collective grief of our nations and world. Children feel the grief of this pandemic and in many cases have experienced compounded death over the past year, both directly and indirectly. This is what Dr. Wolfelt refers to as “loss overload.” “A child is eight years old and grandma has died from COVID, and then grandpa dies from COVID, and then they have to move. They have too much loss. Before they can mourn one loss, they have another loss which puts them at risk for just shutting down. So sometimes those circumstances inhibit a child’s ability to mourn based on the reality of being overwhelmed by too much loss.”
The multiple layers of loss and grief many children are experiencing today–deaths of family and perhaps friends, death by suicide, as well as the collective grief from the pandemic, gun violence, and racial violence–calls for better education and support. This year has created an opening for many organizations to connect with schools, as well as offer virtual support in communities, that may never have had a dedicated approach to grief and mourning. “Children are never too young to feel and talk about death, anyone young enough to love is old enough to mourn.” says Wolfelt. And the fact that we now all have access to resources and people that support children and their caregivers brings us one step closer to helping a child never experience suffocated grief or become a forgotten mourner.
Additional Resources:
Surviving Life After a Parent Dies (SLAP’D)
The National Alliance for Grieving Children
Literary Resources for Children:
When Dinosaurs Die: A Guide to Understanding Death – Laurie Krasny Brown
Children Also Grieve: Talking About Death and Healing – Linda Goldman
A Complete Book About Death for Kids – Earl Grollman
When Something Terrible Happens – Marge Heegaard
Lifetimes: A Beautiful Way to Explain Death to Children – Bryan Mellonie
Tear Soup: A recipe for Healing After a Loss – Chuck DeKlyen and Pat Shwiebert
The Secret C: Straight Talking about Cancer – Julie Stokes
Bio: Loren Talbot is the co-editor of the INELDA newsletter and an INELDA-trained doula.
Bio: INELDA member Janine Jordison started her career as an end-of-life doula in the fall of 2019 in British Columbia, Canada. Having personally felt the lack of support around grief, death and dying as a child, she was moved to focus on education and creating awareness around children’s grief. This spring she introduced her first workshop called Precious Little Souls – Supporting Children Through Grief, A Series for Parents. She can be found at Ridge Meadow Wellness