Making Sense of Your Child's Grief, Part 2: Does My Child Need to Grieve?

by Chris Shaw, MAMFT


What constitutes a loss is different for each individual since we are created with individual desires and interests.  Not only hard times, but even what seem to be happy life events can be losses for children.   Life changes of any sort are stressful and may be processed by a child as a loss of normalcy.  Beginning school, moving into a new larger home, divorce, the death of loved one or pet, the addition of a younger sibling, a new job for mom or dad; all of these can pose a threat to stability and safety for a child.  When we experience loss, whether young or old, we are forced to accept things that lie beyond our own control.  Getting to that place of acceptance is the difficult part.  Grief is a God-given means of coping with things that we cannot change.  It reinforces our helplessness as we are confronted by our own humanity.  The difficult process of grieving, though, is actually necessary for healing to take place.

Many have identified the stages of grief as 1) denial 2) bargaining 3) anger 4) depression 5) acceptance.  Children may experience grief differently in conjunction with their developmental stage.  Because they often lack a framework to understand why they are experiencing these emotions, children try to make the incomprehensible understandable within their existing cognitive framework.  They may think that something is wrong with them for feeling the way they do, or try to accept blame for the loss as though it were their fault.  “If only I had said or done things differently, then things wouldn't have turned out this way.”  In addition, children may try to suppress their emotions because of the discomfort of them, yet what often follows is a spectrum of coping unhealthy mechanisms: outbursts of anger, decreased participation in activities, loss of focus in school, isolation, substance abuse, defiance, or harm to self and others.  Children need to know that it is okay to feel sadness, anger and the entire tangled web of emotions that arise from loss, and that it is important to understand and have good outlets for those emotions.  Normalizing emotions for a child who needs to grieve can help to reduce the shame often associated with grieving.  Children take grieving cues from the adults around them.  When a loss is a family felt issue, modeling grieving for your children can help them to accept and understand the emotions that they are feeling.  Talking through the difficult situations in life openly, as a family, with the goal of understanding one another's emotional pain allows pain to be shared and healing to take place.  A safe environment is essential for grieving to take place.  The task for the parent becomes: how can I make my home a safe place for emotions?