Children And Grief

I’m sitting in a park in my hometown, gently swinging while we talk about something most families stumble through: children and grief. When a divorce hits, a loved one dies, a pet dies, or life changes in the way it can, children are often the easiest to miss not because we don’t love them, but because the adults are barely functioning. If you’ve ever felt guilty for not having the energy to deal with or check in with your children, you are not alone.

We discuss how so many of us were never taught how to talk about death and grief, and how that silence gets passed down. We also unpack a few common choices that seem protective but can create confusion, like keeping kids away from funerals or using soft phrases such as “Grandpa went to sleep.” For some children that lands fine, but for others it can spark real fear, including anxiety around going to sleep. 

This really reinforces the need for us as adults to get comfortable talking about death, loss, change, and grief. It hits us all and our children need a safe place. They need us to be comfortable talking amongst ourselves and to them. They need to see us accepting it as a natural part of life so they can. 

You’ll also hear a practical way to help that doesn’t require a plan: show up and listen. If you know a family walking through loss, your calm presence can give children a safe place to speak, even if all you do is let them talk with you nearby. 

If this resonates, subscribe for more honest conversations about grief support, share this with someone caring for children,  and leave a review so more families can find it when they need it most.

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Transcript

Why Kids Get Overlooked

Funeral Choices And Harmful Euphemisms

Be Present And Let Them Talk

Making Grief A Normal Conversation

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Hello and welcome. I'm so glad you're here with me today. I'm trying something new today. We'll see. It's an experiment. We'll see if it works. I am out live in one of the parks in my hometown. And if you can hear, I'm gently swinging on the swing set because today I want to talk to you about children and grief. Now, when there's a change in the family dynamics, environment, whether it's a divorce, a death of a loved one, death of a pet, whatever change comes, children are often overlooked. And it's not done on purpose. We love our children. It's not purposely done, but sometimes we don't have the capacity. We're wrapped up, the adults are wrapped up in figuring things out, containing our own grief, sometimes just getting out of bed every morning. And we just we just do not have the energy, the capacity to even see how our children are doing. See, you know, and we also haven't been taught how to handle grief and how to talk about death and grief. And so that sometimes makes us hesitate. But a lot of times it's just that we're just wrapped up in our own grief. You know, a lot of times we don't take the children to the funeral, we they don't see the dead body, they don't go to the visitation. They can be told things like, you know, grandpa just went to sleep, which for some children that that works. And for others, it terrifies them to go to sleep themselves because they're like, wait a minute, grandpa went to sleep. So there's oftentimes deep-rooted issues that as adults we have to deal with because the adults in our life did not know how to. They were not taught because their parents, their grandparents did not talk about death and grief. So before I go any further, I want to encourage you that if you know a family that's going through something and there's children, and if you're close enough to this family that you can come alongside, and you don't even have to have anything planned on what you would say, or or you don't even you really don't have to have anything planned, honestly. You can just be that presence. And if it comes up, if the children say something, then you can just let them talk. You don't have to panic and try to figure out what should you say or be afraid that you're gonna say the wrong thing. Just be there and and just listen to them. And if there's more than one child, let them talk amongst themselves. You'd be surprised at what the children will even just bring up on their own. So I encourage you to be a support to a family like that, if you can. And I just want to encourage us, that's why it's so important that we all learn to get comfortable with death, comfortable with grief. And grief is in so many different ways, isn't it? I mean, we often just think it's the death of a loved one or death of a pet, but I mean, there's there's the loss of a dream, the loss of a job, the change in your role in your family, your your children move out. There's so many things. There could be a loss of your of your dream, uh, the life that you had always wanted. And so I just want to encourage you that we really need, it's very important for us to learn to talk about death and grief, to get comfortable, so that as adults, we're talking in front of the children, and the children are hearing it, and the children, and the children are able to have a safe place where they can just talk amongst themselves to the adults, that it's just it's a comfortable thing to talk about grief. This is the caring death duo, and I am here for you.