Supporting a child through grief

Geraldine Mace from Be More Life Coaching • Jul 20, 2019

Grief is the normal and natural reaction to loss of any kind but how many of you, as parents or those looking after children, struggle to know how to support a child through grief? How many of you get that sinking feeling when your child asks you questions about loss or grief? How many of you know how to support yourself through the grief process? There is very little helpful information out there that teaches us how to effectively deal with grief so it’s hardly surprising that we might struggle. I know that when my children were young I found it a challenge.

Grief doesn’t just happen when there is a bereavement. There are over 40 losses that we can encounter during a lifetime including divorce, a family estrangement, the death of a pet, moving house and redundancy to name but a few.

Children learn how to deal with loss by watching what their parents and other adults around them do. This is how we ourselves learned and sadly, because loss and grief are fairly taboo subjects in our society, many of these things were not useful in helping us deal with loss.


How many of you, as children, were encouraged not to feel sad and not to feel scared when loss occurred?

“Don’t feel sad, Grandma has gone to heaven”

“Don’t worry, you’ll find a new friend in the playground tomorrow”

“Don’t make a fuss about your lost toy, we can buy you a new one tomorrow”


How many of you are doing the same thing with your children?

Although we do this with the best of intentions it doesn’t help our children feel better. Most children will continue to cry or feel sad and older children, feeling misunderstood may just take themselves off on their own.


How can we better support our child with these emotions?

·Listen with your heart and allow your child to express their emotions without judgement

·Go first, by telling the truth about your own grief and how it feels, it will help your child to feel safe about opening up to you

·Be patient, don’t try and force them to talk

·If you have more than one child, bear in mind that each will have their own unique and individual way of reacting

·Try not to say “Don’t feel sad”, “Don’t cry”. Children need to feel sad. As I said at the beginning of this blog, Grief is the normal and natural reaction to loss.

·Acknowledge how they are feeling


So next time you are in one of the situations above you could say:

“I feel really sad that Grandma has died, I will miss her very much, it’s ok for you to feel sad”

“It’s horrible to be ignored by your friend, I can imagine that you feel sad about that”

“I know how much you liked that toy, it’s ok to feel sad that you can’t find it”

By doing this, you are letting your child know that they have been heard and that having sad feelings is ok. It also helps your child to know that they can talk to you without being criticised or judged. They have been able to tell their emotional truth and this will make it easier for your child to approach you and talk to you about other difficult issues that occur in their lives.


This is a guest blog post written by Geraldine Mace of Be More Life Coaching . For more information on Geraldine's work, please click here .

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