How children grieve
Children pick up a great deal from the attitudes and behaviour of the people around them. If they are excluded in bereavement on the grounds that it is too distressing, they will still pick up on the distress of adults. Puzzled by what is going on and feeling that it must be something awful if they are not allowed to be part of it, they form an attitude towards death they may take with them right into adulthood. Unfortunately, this attitude may mean that they will be poorly prepared for grief in their adult lives.
But how do you begin to explain to a child what death is? How can you help a child to grieve? These are hard issues to address, especially if the person closest to the bereaved child is suffering the same loss and is not therefore in the best of conditions to handle the feelings of anyone else.
Ideally, the way forward is to acknowledge the shared loss and grieve together.
