Working Through Grief
Helping Your Children Cope With Loss
The experience of grief is unlike any other set of emotions that we as humans come up against. Typically, when an undesirable emotion arises, we find a way to problem-solve the circumstances to make the feeling more tolerable, or we use healthy coping mechanisms to dissipate the strength of the emotion we are looking to escape. When it comes to grief, however, the outcome is the process, and the only way to get through our feelings of loss is to experience the full gamut of emotions that accompany it. Additionally, grief is a recurrent emotion and can last for months, years or, in some cases, a lifetime. The process of healthy grieving tends to be confusing for children and adolescents who are more concrete in their thinking and solution-focused due to cognitive limitations that are normal and expected within the scope of their development.
Grief comes in many sizes and shapes and is not limited to death alone. Humans can experience grief after a divorce, a move or a severed relationship. Grief can be difficult to identify, especially in children, because it may look more like anger or anxiety than sadness.
If you suspect that your child or teen is experiencing feelings of grief and feel uncertain about how to support them, read below for some ideas that can help you and your youngster:
Encourage your young one to share, and lead by example. Children are excellent at following directions that are the product of unspoken rules. Children observe and absorb all aspects of their environment, including the topics that are acceptable to talk about and the topics that are not. While this does not hold true for all off-limit topics, it does for topics that require emotional validation to unshield. Children typically have no problem verbalizing potty talk, despite knowing that this type of language is unacceptable. Reason being: potty talk is silly and emotionally safe to discuss. Feelings are the single most accurate representation of our core - you don’t get much more real than emotions. As such, children often will not share their emotions about personal topics if an adult has not given them explicit permission to do so. Tell your little one it is safe to share, and show them that verbal sharing is healthy by role-modeling this skill. If you think your little one is holding back, he/she probably is. Give your children the permission they need to express a full range of emotions.
Validate, validate, validate! Some parents worry that a child who is overly validated may grow up to be an arrogant adult who lacks perspective-taking skills. The exact opposite is actually true. A child who is reared in an emotionally validating environment learns to respect the emotions of others, because someone respected theirs. Children need to be emotionally validated and told that even if others don’t feel the same way, their emotions are okay and acceptable to have. In the absence of validation, children shut down and do not talk. Emotional validation may sound like, “It’s okay to share about dad,” or it may look like an adult practicing this skill in vivo by saying, “I miss daddy.” Either way, children need to know they will be validated before they share. Practice validating your youngster on a regular basis, and watch for changes in his/her affect and demeanor. It’s amazing what a little validation can do in the life of a child.
Be truthful about developmentally appropriate facts and circumstances. Parents often worry that by telling their children too much, they will fret and not be able to handle the information that is imparted to them. Have you ever heard of the sixth sense? Children have it. They know when something is “off” in their environment and they question motives behind observable behaviors. Without a definitive answer as to why mommy is sad or Uncle no longer comes around, children will fill in their own blanks, and these fictional scenarios are often far worse than the truthful circumstances surrounding their origin. Help dissipate your child’s anxiety levels by telling him/her information that is developmentally appropriate to share. You may not want to tell your little one who doesn’t understand the concept of jail that a beloved family member is locked up, but you may want to tell him/her that this person made a poor choice and had to go away to learn how to make better decisions. You may not be comfortable discussing the word abuse with your child, so break it down. Children understand expected and unexpected ways to treat those around them. This common knowledge can help you explain the topic of abuse without using the exact word, if you are uncomfortable doing so. One possible explanation might be that the family member was having difficulty acting safely with his/her body and now needs space to learn how to deal with angry emotions. Children deserve to know about their environment, and finding developmentally appropriate ways to explain complicated circumstances is a perfect way to impart knowledge about complex topics.
Different strokes for different folks. We all seem to understand and even laugh at this phrase until it applies to our own children feeling differently than we do about an emotionally loaded topic. When a loss occurs, whether it’s the result of a divorce or death, children are bound to have different emotions than the adults in their lives do, simply because their relationship with the loved one is/was different than that of the parent’s. After a divorce, children may feel sad, while one parent feels empowered. In the wake of a death, children may linger at a certain stage of grief longer than their parent does, or they may have an entirely different emotional reaction altogether. While this discrepancy can be challenging to cognitively digest, adults must be careful not to convey felt confusion as emotional rejection in response. Wording and intonation change meaning, so be careful with the words you use and be aware of your tone of voice when asking questions. As opposed to asking, “What do you feel THAT way?” you could say, “Tell me more about that feeling.” The former will be received as a criticism, while the latter is non-threatening curiosity.