How Grief and Mourning Affect Children

I define grief quite simply as what one feels following a loss.

Grief can feel crushingly sad, or it can feel like numbness. It can come in waves, or it can wait a month and then mow you down. It can take forms that do not feel—or look—at all like sadness.

There is no right way and no wrong way to grieve or mourn. This is true for children as well as adults. Grief is personal. It is unique to each grieving person. It may be private, or it may be loud and public. When children run around and play following a loss, people will say that the children are not grieving—or that they are not grieving appropriately. This is simply untrue. Children grieve in their own ways.

For children, as well as for adults, every loss is unique, and every loss is experienced uniquely.

After years of studying bereavement, one of researcher George Bonanno’s most consistent findings is that “bereavement is not a one-dimensional experience. It’s not the same for everyone and there do not appear to be specific stages that everyone must go through.”[i]

Mourning, on the other hand, is often defined as our outward expression of loss. But here, I will focus on the complexities of its internal processes. Mourning takes time. It requires energy and focus. It involves a reworking of the relationship with the person who has died so that it transforms from an external, real-world relationship to an internal one. And in this process, parts of the lost loved one can become part of the mourner.

How do we know when mourning is moving forward? We know that mourning is successful when the bereaved person is able to move ahead in life and make room for new relationships.

Over the years, writers and clinicians have tried to tame the process of mourning by categorizing into stages and tasks. But in the end, mourning can take any number of shapes. There is no set of stages everyone must pass through. It is just like other painful, out-of-control experiences in our lives: it is messy, and there is no definitive road map.

One thing we do know for sure is that for mourning to occur, the first thing that must happen is that the bereaved person must acknowledge that a loss has occurred.

This may seem obvious. But when you lose someone you really love, it is sometimes hard to accept that they are really gone. You want to believe that it is all a big mistake. You want to think that they will come back eventually. You may find yourself denying that they are really gone.

This is especially true for children, and it is particularly true for the youngest children. Before the age of five, most children do not understand what death is. They do not understand that it is permanent. They do not realize that someone who dies cannot and will not come back.

Being unable to acknowledge that a loved one is really gone can be part of what makes mourning difficult for children, especially young children. Children under the age of five need a great deal of help from adults to remember that the person who has died is not going to come back.

When someone dies, young children wish them to come back, and they may believe that they will come back. As a result, they will not feel all the sad feelings that come with understanding that someone is truly lost.

Even children over five, who may understand the concept of the permanence of death a little better, need help remembering that when someone has died, they cannot return no matter what we wish for. Additionally, while children who are six, seven, and eight may understand that death is permanent, they often think that if someone leaves or dies, it must either be their fault or someone else’s fault.

So you can see that at each age, there are developmental differences that caregivers must understand and consider in order to truly understand and help the child with their grief and mourning.

Without adults to remind the child, misunderstandings can lodge in their minds. The child may think that if only she is good enough, the person she lost will come back. Or she may think that if only she had been good enough in the first place, they would never have gone away.

If the child does not truly understand that a person or a thing they lost is really gone permanently, they may not feel as sad as they would have if they did understand that the person is gone forever—and thus, mourning cannot really occur, or it may be delayed until they fully understand and accept what has happened.

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For similar reasons, it can also be hard, particularly for older children, to mourn other kinds of losses, such as deployment to the military, parental separation or divorce, the loss of a home, or when friends or relatives move away. In these cases, no one has died. It may be hard for the child to know what to feel. If a child does not know if her parents will get back together or if she does not know if her deployed parent will come back, it is very hard to know whether to mourn. The child is left in a kind of limbo. She may feel confused—or sad—or angry—or some combination of these.

It is more straightforward for a child when someone or something is gone and cannot come back due to death. But in both loss due to death and in ambiguous loss, there can be mourning—and for mourning to occur, the child must experience the loss, acknowledge the loss, and have internal reactions to and feelings about the loss.

So, how does mourning start?

Initially, the mourner may feel shocked. It may take time to fully acknowledge what has happened and for feelings to set in.

Then there can be a period of intense pain and sadness—crying and yearning and wishing for the person to come back. These feelings often come in waves, and they may show up at unexpected moments—often when the child sees something or does something that the person who is gone might have seen or done with them.

Sadness, whenever it shows up in the mourning process, has a function. Research has shown that when children (and adults) feel sad, this turns their attention inwards so that they can examine what they have lost and try to adjust to this loss. Sadness tends to slow children down, providing them with time to reflect. [ii]

After awhile, the child can generally begin to think about and remember who or what has been lost without as much shock or pain as they felt initially. They can start to sort out what they miss and what part of the lost person or thing they want to hold on to, and meaning can be made of the loss. It can be processed and understood. After this has happened, the sad feelings generally diminish—and while they may not go away entirely, they are usually far less painful than they were in the beginning. The enormous sadness can be replaced by occasional memories that evoke shorter periods of sad feelings.

Throughout this process, each child’s grief is shaped by their age, their stage of development, their relationship with the person (or thing) they lost, and their own particular personality and life circumstances. No two children experience loss in exactly the same way—even if they have lost the same thing. To one child, the loss of a father when they are twelve may feel catastrophic and result in a long-lasting depression. For another child, the loss of a father at twelve may feel freeing and promote independence—after their initial shock and sadness have diminished.

Some children bounce back more quickly than others. There is an increasing amount of research being done on what has been called resilience—the idea that some infants, children, and adults weather adverse events more easily than others, and some children raised under adverse conditions do better than others.

People often believe that if an event is very difficult for a child, it will definitely result in the child experiencing trauma and symptoms of post-traumatic stress, anxiety, or depression. However, research has found that potentially traumatic events are fairly common in children’s lives and often do not result in post-traumatic stress symptoms. This is especially true if a child experiences just one or two very difficult events. In fact, in their large, community-based study, William Copeland and his colleagues demonstrated that the outcome after a child’s first trauma exposure is generally good. [iii]

Research has shown that it is usually only in certain very specific circumstances under which a child develops post-traumatic symptoms. These include having suffered multiple traumas, having a history of anxiety, or living in a family undergoing severe difficulties.

It is also important to note that parents and other loved ones can make a difference: the nurturing skill of the person who takes care of the infant or child following a difficult event is crucial. The more sensitive the caretaker is to the moods, feelings, and needs of the infant or child and the greater their capacity to provide soothing and comfort for the child, the more likely it is that the infant or child will recover well from any adversity they experience.

This post is an excerpt from my book, How Children Grieve, which was published by Alcove Press last month.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Children-Grieve-What-Adults/dp/1639106723/re…