Normalizing Death Helps Children

In today’s episode we talk again about children and grief. We discuss how important it is for children to see death as a natural part of life. They need to be part of conversations and hear adults talking. 

If talking about death around children makes your chest tighten, you’re not alone and that discomfort is exactly why the conversation matters. 

We dig into how children learn what grief “means” by watching the adults around them, and how silence can quietly teach them that death is scary, or off-limits. When children don’t feel safe asking questions, they often carry unresolved grief into adulthood, expecting time and adulthood  to fix what never got named. 

We explore what it looks like to normalize death as a natural part of life, not a topic reserved for whispers in the hallway. That includes being honest about how hard grief is, letting children be included as much as they feel able to, and recognizing how moments like missing a funeral or a hospital visit can become lifelong pain points. The goal isn’t to force big conversations on demand, but to make your home and your relationships a place where death can be mentioned without everyone shutting down. 

You’ll also hear practical community-based ideas that make these talks easier: informal Death Cafe style meetups and Death and Cheesecake gatherings where people can listen, share fears, and speak plainly with no agenda. We highlight children’s grief centers too, including how they may process loss through peer conversation, arts and crafts, reenactment play, or movement when words don’t come. 

If you want better tools for supporting grieving children, it starts with growing your own comfort and modeling that it’s safe to feel. 

Subscribe for more conversations like this, share this with someone raising kids, and leave a review with one thing you wish adults had said to you about death. I’d love to hear from you!

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Transcript

Normalizing Death As Part Of Life

How Childhood Shapes Grief Beliefs

Creating Spaces To Talk About Death

Children’s Grief Centers And How They Help

Supporting Kids By Growing Ourselves

Closing Thoughts And Farewell

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Hello and welcome back. I'm glad that you're here with me today. I wanted to do another episode this week on grief and children because since I was doing it live at the park, I felt like I got interrupted and rushed at the end because somebody showed up where I was at. And I just feel like this is a very important topic. And I think it's key, hopefully, to convincing you and others how important it is to get comfortable talking about death, to naturalizing death as a part of life. You know, there's life and there's death, and we celebrate, we celebrate birth, we celebrate life. And I believe we need to celebrate more of death. We need to not be afraid of it. We need to get comfortable with it. We need to understand it, to know how we feel about it, work our way through that, prepare for it, let our family, our friends know how we want our last days to be. If we have, you know, the opportunity to have that choice. So I think it's very important that we continue to talk because it's children are the key. It's like what you learned as a child, and this applies really to every area, but we're obviously just talking about grief and death and the beliefs that we have, the fears that we have around those topics. But it's just so important on how the adults handled it around you. And each of us are different. So some of us, you know, are going to be hurt that we weren't allowed to go to grandma's funeral. Some of us are going to be disappointed and carry that through our lives that, you know, we didn't get to visit grandpa in the hospital, or mom, or uncle, or whoever it is, you know, that we weren't there. I mean, even as adults, that can bother us. So just imagine what it can do to a child's mind that sets their belief. And I think if we don't talk about it, if if children don't feel safe, if they don't feel like they can approach us, maybe because we are grieving so hard and we push them away or we stop talking when they come into the room, then they feel like this is an adult topic. That okay, when I'm an adult, I'll understand it. And then they get to adulthood and they have all these memories and unresolved issues from their childhood. And they just expect to, I don't know, in the wisdom of adulthood, in the just the growth, being older, that it would be easier. And I it it for some people that may shock their system that that it's not easier, you know, it's it's hard. Grief, death is hard. And so I just really want to encourage you, encourage us to really start talking about death among your family, among your any group that you're in, anytime you can bring it up. Uh, if you have a community that hosts death cafes or any kind of death meetings where it is a place of no agenda, it's just a place to gather. I actually do that in my hometown. I've started uh death and cheesecake gatherings where people can just come in. And like I said, there's no agenda, there's no program. It's just a time to come in. And if you're comfortable, you can talk or you can sit and listen. And it's just a time to be community and discuss our experiences, our fears, not a support group, you know, not counseling or anything, but just fellow human beings that gather together and talk about this. So I want to encourage you to look that up and see if there's anything. I know that the Death Cafe is an organization that is international, so you may be able to find something in that. I would encourage you also to look up children's grief centers, because I know there's some really good ones, at least here in the states, that are a good place for children to gather with other children. And it's really centered around children. And children sit together, and and there's adults there, there's plenty of adults there for support. And you know, if there's anything that arises that they need to intervene in, but they just sit there and they let the children just talk amongst themselves. And you would really be amazed at how much children can really, they're really open and often willing and able to talk. Now, there's some that won't. There's some that won't say a word at all, and they, you know, they just sit there and that's fine. And then a lot of times these grief centers or children's grief centers will then have a creative space with arts and crafts that children can go and create something. Or there's even a corner that they've set up as a hospital so that children can reenact if that is their experience. And then there's also, you know, areas for movement because sometimes some children that don't want to talk, but they need to get it out, they need to move. And so I would really encourage you to look into your area, into your community, your surrounding communities, and see if you have a child grief center so that you can be supportive. Maybe you can volunteer. I'm not sure you'd have to look into each each um uh organization's rules on that. But even if you just have that as a source to be able to tell a family that you know that has children that are grieving. I'm just really uh just actually just found out about this probably a month or so ago and and was able to listen to a director of one of these organizations actually out on the West Coast. So I haven't done the research locally from my area. I'm I'm hoping there is one near somewhere. Um, but this is just something that we really need to we need to we need to support our children, we need to support our families. But more importantly, in thinking of our children, we need to grow ourselves. We need to learn and adapt and to get comfortable talking about death and grief so that the children around us see it as just you know a natural part, a natural part of life. And maybe we can make the future generations not so not so afraid and not so uncomfortable. Thank you for joining me today. This is the caring death dealer, and I am here for you.