How to Help Children Cope with Grief
This 20-page booklet presents ideas for helping children cope with grief through a developmental lens. The text presents distinct approaches for speaking to young people about death and grief in nuanced, age-appropriate ways. Specific guidelines are provided for supporting toddlers, children, pre-teens, and teenagers.
In addition to highlighting how children grieve differently by age, this booklet addresses the importance of caregivers managing their own grief, as well as the child's, in separate yet integrateable ways.
You may download a free PDF version of the guide by following the steps below.
Inside, you’ll find peer-informed, lived-experience strategies for helping a child cope with the death of a parent or a loved one:
Individual Strategies: Addressing grief according to a child’s age, personality, social maturity, and other environmental factors.
Acknowledging Loss: Choosing transparency rather than denial as a way of normalizing discussions about death and grief while setting examples for advantageous, long-term behaviors.
Letting Kids be Kids: The importance of play, exploration, creativity, and peer connection.
Active Listening: Offering undivided attention while hearing a child’s concerns, answering their questions, and responding appropriately with your own reactions to the loss.
Continuing Bonds: Helping a grieving child find fun, interactive, expressive ways of honoring their loved one during birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays.
Addressing Stigma: Helping grieving kids navigate the social difficulties that can be attached to a stigmatized death, such as overdose or suicide.
Safety and Reassurance: Providing safe, sustainable spaces for addressing grief and loss through consistent, clear communication.
Created through peer-informed, professionally documented, lived-experience research, this booklet discusses the distinct challenges inherent in how children cope with grief and those their caregivers face.