Grieving Children
Do young children grieve? Yes.
What we have seen at the Caring Place is that anyone old enough to love is old enough to grieve. Even very young children have their own stories of the deaths that have exploded their worlds. Young children grieve as much as adults do. Often, though, their grief is masked because it looks different than what we're used to seeing in adults and older kids.
Kids grieve in small pieces at a time. They can't take the full force of the loss all at once. Their grieving is very inefficient. They approach it, feel it, take it in and then go off and play something totally different. They'll come back again for another dose of grieving when they're ready.
But just because they're playing doesn't mean that they're not grieving. Often, adults will see kids at play and think, "That death must not have made much impact because they're just going right on playing." They are grieving but in their own way.
A child's age will affect the way in which they react to a death as well. Preschool children often see death as an absence. They fail to comprehend the permanency of death. Elementary school age children understand that the person who died is not ever coming back. However, they have yet to develop the complex language to help them talk about feeling broken-hearted. At this age the children often reveal much anxiety over who will be available to take care of them. Adolescents have a greater understanding of the meaning of the death for the future. They are often mourning what the relationship could have been as well as what that person meant to them in the present. For teens, the support of other teens who understand is very important.
Following a death a child will have many questions. Being available to a grieving child to hear these questions is more important than having the answers to the questions. It is in the asking, not the answering that discovery and healing take place.
