In Due Course

Welcome to another installment of In Due Course. Today, I want to continue the discussion that I started last week on children and grief. Last week’s posting concerned the issues particular to children when they mourn. Today, I will explore children’s needs and how supportive adults can help. Just like last week, today’s information is adapted from William Worden’s book Children and Grief: When a Parent Dies, a book describing the results of the two-year Harvard Child Bereavement Study.

While styles of grieving differ among children – just as they do among adults, the developmental stages of children also give rise to specific needs that adults should be aware of and be prepared to help address. Worden has recognized 10 of these. Because of space limitations, I will address 5 of those today and the remaining 5 next week.

1. The Need for Adequate Information – A child’s ability to understand the concept of death depends on his/her ability to deal with abstractions such as the finality and irreversibility of death and on his/her prior learning experiences of death involving other people and/or animals. If children are not given appropriate and adequate information after a loss occurs, they are likely to create their own “information” to fill in the holes of their experience. For example, if a knowing adult does not tell the child about the cause of death he/she may rationalize the death by constructing an elaborate scenario of why the person died. Unfortunately, a child’s fantasy can lead to unrealistic fears about death and disease. An age-appropriate explanation can help children dispel any fantasies they have created.In the same vein, caring adults should tell affected children about the impending death of someone they love. Sometimes parents think they are “protecting” their children by withholding information about the parent’s own or someone else’s impending death. However, children are highly observant and can tell when something is happening. Not telling them what is going on can make them feel anxious, unimportant, and in the worst case, responsible for what is happening to the dying person.
2. The Need to Address Fears and Anxieties – As I wrote last week, there are normally two fears that children experience after the death of a love one, especially a parent: “Who will take care of me?” and “Will someone else die?” The first fear is the basic, primitive anxiety that we cannot survive without our parents. This fear occasionally arises even in adult children after the death of one or both parents (see my posting Mourning: Loss of Parents). There are a couple of ways to help children handle these fears. The first is to give the child adequate information about who will take care of him/her in the event something happens to the parent(s). The second is to reassure the child about the longevity of the parent(s). Another, and often overlooked, way of providing security for children is to maintain, as much as possible, the same routines and level of discipline as before the death. Parents have a tendency to ease up on discipline, especially after a parental death, because the child is already going through so much. However, research by J.M. Strength has shown that appropriate discipline can go a long way in reassuring children and reducing anxiety. Children inwardly desire limits and enforcing pre-existing ones at such a difficult time can make them feel cared for and more secure.
3. The Need for Reassurance They Are Not to Blame – I also mentioned this last week as an issue that children can face after a loss. A child’s understanding of the power of feelings are not well established when they are young. They realize that strong feelings can hurt someone, and from that, they might construe that their feelings about someone contributed to that person’s death. Again, adequate information can help children understand that their negative feelings or shortcomings did not cause the loss.
4. The Need for Careful Listening – Just as adults need someone to listen to their concerns and not minimize them, children need the same for their fears, fantasies, and questions. Some questions children ask may seem strange and make adults feel uncomfortable (e.g., “How does Grandpa eat now that he is in the ground?”), but for the child they are real concerns and should not be trivialized. They ask these questions because they do not understand about death, so when they do ask, the best response is a simple, age-specific explanation using basic facts, followed by asking the child to verify what he/she understood the answer to be.
5. The Need for Validation of Feelings – Coupled with the need for careful listening, children, just like adults, need to have their feelings validated and respected. In order not to feel helpless, adults sometimes try to tell children how they should feel. However, children need to be able to express their thoughts and feelings in their own particular way and time. What they are experiencing is real to them and adults need to acknowledge that.

Next week, I will continue with the final 5 needs of grieving children.

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