How Is Grief Experienced in Children?
When someone or something is taken away from our lives and we are left to deal with the loss alone, we have to go through the process of mourning.
Contrary to what most people think, we don't just have to go through this when a loved one dies. In fact, the hardest and most traumatic parts of loss are usually experienced after a death.
Furthermore, grief does not move in a way that we go through steps one by one and then feel like we have "overcome" it when we look back.
A more true statement would be that there are as many ways to grieve as there are people in the world. Grief can look very different for kids and adults.
This varies depending on things like how the death happened, the bond with the person who died, family culture, and whether the person has been through a loss before.
Children and I have been touched in different ways by the deaths we have seen so often, especially during the pandemic.
Situations like deaths happening one after the other or all at once have made us feel deeply useless, incapable, and powerless.
Because of the virus, our ways of saying goodbye to the dead have also had to change. We are not getting the help we need.
Kids are the ones who need our help the most in these hard times, and we give it to them in many ways. It's important to remember that this truth, which we call "part of life" and which is hard for adults to talk about, is even harder for kids to deal with.
It's harder for kids to talk about, understand, and handle their feelings than it is for adults, even if the feelings aren't called emotions. So, how should kids deal with the fact that life and death are inevitable? What can we do?
Giving the child accurate knowledge and helping them make sense of the loss has a big effect on their healing. We might think we know what the kid knows, how much they understand, and how they deal with things, but this makes it hard for us to fully understand and help them.
There are times when we may hide information from them or even lie to them because we think it will hurt them more. If there are blanks in the puzzle, though, the kid may try to colour them in on their own.