Help Children Grieve

 Although death is an expected and normal part of life, losing a parent, a sibling, or another attachment figure during childhood is considered to be one of the most intense and potentially traumatic events a child can experience (Griese et al., 2018; Keyes et al., 2014; Yamamoto et al., 1996). One of the reasons childhood bereavement can be more difficult to understand is that there are vast growth changes that occur between birth and age seventeen. 

For most of human history, children were viewed as small adults without attention paid to the many behavioral and developmental stages that occur from birth through adulthood. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that childhood development began to be studied. However, despite understanding that children are developmentally different from adults, childhood grief has been clumped with adult grief under the assumption that grief is similar in both populations and therefore warrants the same care. This is a gross failure in childhood bereavement practices. Grief will manifest itself in relation to the child’s developmental stage at the time of loss (Kaplow et al., 2012). For this reason, several stark differences occur. 

The first is that a child’s grief process isn’t continuous and therefore appears to be intermittent or finished when in reality, children titrate their emotions (Corr, Nable, & Corr, 1997), resulting in a longer grieving period than adults (Fitzgerald, 1992; O’Toole & Cory, 1998). Adults will often misinterpret this behavior as the child not understanding the loss or as the child having moved through the grief process (Howarth, 2011). One reason a child’s grief process is intermittent is due to their inability or trouble in articulating their emotions (Corr et al., 1997). Grief is experienced as a variety of emotions, often appearing simultaneously. For example, guilt, aggression, yearning, anxiety, fear, and anger are all connected with grief (Archer, 1999; Howarth, 2011; Jakoby, 2012) and can appear together. 

Because children often lack the language to express their feelings, they are more likely to struggle to communicate their experiences, and they may also intuitively withdraw from the chaos they feel inside. 

The grief is more likely to manifest as psychosomatic symptoms, emotional tantrums, and poor academic performance (Bergman, 2017; Howarth, 2011). Further, an often overlooked key factor that influences how children process their grief is the caregiving environment (Alvis et al., 2022). However, the similarity between the grief of a child and that of an adult is that both child and adult must work with the grief to find healing within the new reality.