Part of this post is excerpted from my forthcoming book, How Children Grieve: What Adults Miss and What They Can Do to Help

Previously in this series I talked about the little losses of everyday life, about ambiguous loss and about how to talk to children about death. But eventually, most children suffer an actual loss when a loved one dies.

This is just so painful – both for the child – and for the adults who love the child and want to understand what she is feeling.

And there is so much to understand.

Behind childhood grief is a world of feelings and beliefs, shaped and colored by the child’s age and stage of development but also by the child’s personality, the degree of closeness she had with the person who died, her particular family circumstances, her culture AND by the way her parents feel about this loss in particular and about loss in general.

The problem in understanding what your child feels about her loss is that it is often difficult for her to put this into words. And lacking an explanation, adults who try to help a grieving child often look at the child’s behavior – and when they look at the child’s behavior, they form ideas of what the child is feeling and how they are affected based just on external impressions.

And in doing so, they can miss a lot.

They can miss what is going on in the child’s inner world; they can miss what the child truly feels about the loss; they can miss what the child understands about the loss; they can miss the child’s misconceptions about death and loss in general; they can miss the child’s fantasies about this loss in particular and what role the child believes she played in causing the loss to happen.

And it is important not to miss these things.

When a child loses someone they love, the child doesn’t stop loving that person. The child may not even really believe that person is gone. The child may start searching for them everywhere they go, and each night they may see their lost loved one in their dreams.

When a child loses a beloved person, their love for that person becomes a one-sided equation. It is an unreciprocated, lonely kind of love that involves powerful feelings of missing their lost loved one.

All this missing can feel different for each child. It can feel like pain. Or it can feel like confusion. It can feel like an ongoing emptiness. It can feel like an ache in the pit of the stomach or a headache that never ends. Some children stop eating. Some start eating too much to fill that emptiness.

Most children can’t bear the feeling for long, and they take breaks from it by returning to play and school activities. This could make it seem like the child is no longer grieving. But, in fact, it does not mean the pain, the emptiness, the yearning, or most of all, the loving has stopped.

For example, Chloe was four years old when her grandmother died. She had been close to her grandmother, seeing her at least once almost every week of her life. After being told that her grandmother had died, Chloe went off to the family room. Her parents observed her playing quietly with her dolls, and they were relieved. They felt that she had taken the news very well and saw her as returning to her normal activities.

Several weeks later, when Chloe began to have trouble at bedtime, refusing to go to sleep without one parent or the other lying down with her, they did not link this to her experience of her grandmother’s death. They felt that she was being “clingy” without good reason.

What the parents missed was that her behavior at bedtime was a communication to them.

The truth was that Chloe was very frightened. She had been told that her Nana had “gone to sleep forever and was now with God in Heaven,” so she was afraid to go to sleep, fearing that she would never wake up and that she would go to be with God in Heaven.

When Chloe went to play with her dolls after being told the news of her grandmother’s death, she had played a game of putting her dolls to bed and having them go to sleep and then go to Heaven. She played this over and over, trying to work out both how someone could sleep forever and where Heaven was.

In addition to becoming frightened to go to sleep for fear that she too would sleep forever, Chloe was feeling more fearful of separations in general. She began to have tantrums each morning when it was time to go to preschool and when either her mother or her father left the house. She also had powerful feelings of missing her Nana and didn’t understand why she couldn’t still go to Nana’s house to visit. AND she was worried that others in her life might go away and not come back. Of course, her solution to this was to not let anyone she loved out of her sight!

Chloe’s parents had not thought to wonder how Chloe would understand the words they said to her about her grandmother’s death. They had four children altogether, and Chloe was the third. They were happy with Chloe’s adaptation to the news of her grandmother’s death and very caught up with their own grief, the reactions of their other three children and the funeral arrangements.

Chloe’s story is just one example of how a child might react to loss.

In How Children Grieve, I tell many other stories about children’s grief. And I take an in-depth look at the internal world of the child in order to help caregivers better understand the nuances of feeling and fantasy a child may experience when confronted by loss. I discuss how unique each child’s understanding and reaction to loss are and how strongly they are shaped by her personality, family circumstance, age, stage of development, and culture. I talk about losses of all kinds, including losses due to death, abandonment, deployment, divorce, and immigration.

Following a loss, adults sometimes forget that young children who have never lost a loved one before may not know what death really is. For example, one little boy I saw in therapy lost his father when he was three. His grandfather told him that his daddy had gone “up there” and the grandfather pointed to the sky.

This little boy, who I will call Teddy, accepted this explanation — but then he started to regress. He became fearful of separations, he would not take a bath and his speech became babyish.

His grandmother brought him in to see me and in the first session, Teddy sat down in front of my doll house, took the daddy doll out and threw him behind the house. When I asked, “what happened to the daddy?”, he retrieved the doll and said, “The daddy’s on the roof”.

This is what he had understood when his grandfather had told him that “Daddy’s up there”.

He thought daddy now lived on the roof of their house.

Young children know so little about the world. Everything is new — and this includes the concept of death. It is common for them to believe that when someone dies, they have just gone to live somewhere else and that they can come back.

Older children may understand that death is permanent, but they often believe that if a death occurs, it is someone’s fault. This can lead them to blame others -or themselves – if someone they love dies or leaves permanently.

One little boy I saw in treatment was convinced that his parents had gotten a divorce and his father had gone to live abroad because he was not lovable enough. He told me in no uncertain terms that if only he had been better at soccer and a few other things, his father would have stayed.

When someone dies, children under the age five or six need frequent reminders about what has really happened. They need to be told that the person who died cannot come back, even if they might have wanted to. Fantasy is so powerful at this age that it can quickly replace a reality that is poorly understood (as well as being unwanted).

Children under the age of five or six need death to be explained to them in a concrete way, including the facts that when a person or animal dies, it cannot see or hear or breathe or feel anymore.

And when a child between the ages of six and ten loses someone, they need a slightly more nuanced explanation of what has happened. They need to know the truth and they need to be told face to face, soon after the loss has occurred. They need to be told some details about the sort of illness or the event that caused the death. They also need to be reminded that the death was no one’s fault (if this is true).

Teenagers may seem like they don’t need much help following a loss. After all, they understand what death is, and they manage a great many feelings on their own already.

But whatever age a child is — from infancy through young adulthood, support is needed following a loss due to death.

When a teenager retreats to her room following a loss, when she looks at her phone when you try to talk to her about her feelings or about what is going on in the family, this is NOT an indication that she does not need your help.

Like kids of all ages, teenagers may feel uncomfortable talking about their feelings and they may feel awkward when feelings are talked about with them.

But don’t give up. Keep asking how your teen is doing, keep checking in on how they are feeling and keep letting them know how you are doing and feeling.

There is a great deal to understand about children’s understanding of death and their feelings following the loss of a loved one. If you are interested in learning more, check out my new book:

For children of all ages, there will be grief and there will be mourning if they were close to the person who died.

But this grief may not take the form that adults expect.

Some children will show signs of sadness, much like an adult would. But others may not.

Some children may express their feelings readily and ask lots of questions. Others may not show many feelings and the adults around them may wonder whether they are grieving or not.

All children will pop in and out of grief — sometimes seeming sad or angry or irritable and other times going about their usual activities including playing and seeming completely unphased.

But whatever the child’s age, clinical experience and research show that a strong relational environment is one of the most important factors in helping the child to process their grief, tolerate their sad, confused, or angry feelings, and come out the other side.

Adults can help a grieving child by understanding the many forms the child’s grief may take, by tolerating their child’s feelings and by talking about how the child feels, whatever those feelings may be.

This task is complicated, however, because often, when a child is in mourning, the parent will also be in mourning. If a grandparent has died, the parent is grieving the loss of their parent or their parent-in-law. If a sibling has died, the parent will be in mourning for their child. And even if it is a close family friend who has died, the parent will also be affected.

This makes it more difficult for a parent to be available to a child. They may need to bring in help for a brief period of time — and have others provide the support their child needs.

Death is hard to accept for all of us. We all need a great deal of help and support when we lose someone we love — and this is all the more true for children and teenagers.

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