Children and Grief: How to Give Help and Support
Listening carefully to a child’s questions is more important than answering in a perfect way.
Children always have questions when someone dies, even if they don’t know how to ask them. In dealing with children and grief, many of the questions won’t have obvious factual answers. This can be difficult for many adults, especially if they are grieving too. They would rather not deal with a child’s questions as they are afraid of giving the wrong answer, showing their own grief, or simply not having an answer at all.
It is really important to realise that listening and taking children seriously and trying to answer in a simple and honest way is more important than having the right answer. To ignore questions can lead to anger or loneliness in the child. Children’s questions can be the key that unlocks the door to understanding their grief, so you can help them.
Sometimes it is helpful not to answer the question directly if there is no obvious answer but to ask the child what they think, giving him/her a space to express their worries, which you can then start to address with them.
A question by a child who is grieving might be:
“Why did my brother die?”A good answer is:
“Why do you think?”
Commonly a child will express a belief that they are the cause of a death. Young children live in an egocentric world in which they believe they are the cause of everything. Allowing them to express this self-blame out loud enables you to help them understand that not everything is in their control and help them to understand some events are random.
Children re-grieve at different developmental stages.
It is important to allow children to re-grieve as they grow mentally. They need to integrate their understanding at the time a loved one dies with their new understanding as an older child or later an adolescent. If they are openly discouraged from exploring their new understanding of mourning, they may get stuck in their childhood grief.
Children are curious by nature. They often want and need the facts.
It is important to give children information at an age-appropriate level. Withholding all information, or changing the truth, does not spare them the pain. They create their own stories internally which may create more pain than the truth. Children hear and pick up more than adults anticipate but do not always interpret it correctly without help. What they imagine from snippets of information may well be considerably worse than the actual truth; however sad or terrible.
Children often start to wonder if they will die too.
Children can become very scared for their own safety. They may wonder if another person they love will also die and what will happen to them if there is no one to look after them. Their assumption that adults protect them can be shattered and might manifest itself in nightmares, sleeplessness, anxiety, withdrawal or problem behaviour in school or at home.
They need a lot of reassurance, perhaps a real health check if psychosomatic illness is presented. Children’s fears, real or imagined, should be taken seriously in front of them. Help them to feel safe in their own body again. They may become younger than they are in their behaviour while the grief is acute. Extra time for them from teachers in school, a friend who stays with them in the playground, lots of cuddles at home is all part of giving reassurance that they are still cared for. This will enable them to regain a sense of composure within themselves, especially if the death was traumatic. Find ways, or find others who can help the child to express their fears. If problem behaviour is ignored it can grow or if responded to in anger can make their environment less safe rather than more safe. This adds to the grief.
Help find an appropriate way for your children to be part of saying goodbye.
Exclusion from the process of saying goodbye can lead to unresolved grief. Showing your own grief to a child and sharing your grief together can be a positive thing for you all. It can help for the child and you to be sad together, then move on to play together showing something of life can continue safely, then later be sad together again. Children dip in and out of grief. Finding a way to say goodbye can help this for both of you.
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