Previously in this series, I discussed the little losses of everyday life, ambiguous loss and how to talk to children about death. This time I am going to talk about how to understand your child's reactions when she actually loses a loved one.
Losing a loved one is just so painful — both for the child and for the adults who love the child and want to understand what she is feeling.
And there is so much to understand.
Behind childhood grief is a world of feelings and beliefs, shaped and colored by the child’s age and her stage of development — but also by her personality, the degree of closeness she had with the person who died, by the circumstances of the death, by your family culture and by the way you feel about this loss in and about loss in general.
You child's age will affect how she understands — or doesn't understand — what death really is.
Her personality will affect how readily she shows her feelings and also to what degree she is able to actually feel and acknowledge her own feelings.
The degree of closeness your child had with the person who died will affect how strongly she feels about the loss... most of the time. But sometimes, the death of a beloved public figure (such as a performer) or an important person at school may result in what you consider an exaggerated response (but which may feel to your child like a normal response to the loss of someone who meant a great deal to her).
Your family culture may affect how your child does or does not show her feelings — and how you feel about the loss and show your feelings may be one way your child determines how to show her own.
But it is sometimes difficult to know how your child is feeling and responding to a loss because some children and teens — and most very young children — will find it difficult to put their feelings into words.
And lacking an explanation, adults who try to help a grieving child often look at the child’s behavior and form ideas of what the child is feeling and how they are affected based just on external impressions.
And in doing so, they can miss a lot.
They can miss what is going on in the child’s inner world; they can miss what the child truly feels about the loss; they can miss what the child understands about the loss; they can miss the child’s misconceptions about death and loss in general; they can miss the child’s fantasies about this loss in particular and what role the child believes she played in causing the loss to happen.
And it is important not to miss these things.
For example, Chloe was four years old when her grandmother died. She had been close to her grandmother, seeing her at least once almost every week of her life. After being told that her grandmother had died, Chloe went off to the family room. Her parents observed her playing quietly with her dolls, and they were relieved. They felt that she had taken the news very well and saw her as returning to her normal activities.
Several weeks later, when Chloe began to have trouble at bedtime, refusing to go to sleep without one parent or the other lying down with her, they did not link this to her experience of her grandmother’s death. They felt that she was being “clingy” without good reason.
What the parents missed was that her behavior at bedtime was a communication to them.
The truth was that Chloe was very frightened. She had been told that her Nana had “gone to sleep forever and was now with God in Heaven,” so she was afraid to go to sleep, fearing that she would never wake up and that she would go to be with God in Heaven.
When Chloe went to play with her dolls after being told the news of her grandmother’s death, she had played a game of putting her dolls to bed and having them go to sleep and then go to Heaven. She played this over and over, trying to work out both how someone could sleep forever and where Heaven was.
In addition to becoming frightened to go to sleep for fear that she too would sleep forever, Chloe was feeling more fearful of separations in general. She began to have tantrums each morning when it was time to go to preschool and when either her mother or her father left the house. She also had powerful feelings of missing her Nana and didn’t understand why she couldn’t still go to Nana’s house to visit. And she was worried that others in her life might go away and not come back. Of course, her solution to this was to not let anyone she loved out of her sight!
Chloe’s parents had not thought to wonder how Chloe would understand the words they said to her about her grandmother’s death. They had four children altogether, and Chloe was the third. They were happy with Chloe’s adaptation to the news of her grandmother’s death and very caught up with their own grief, the reactions of their other three children and the funeral arrangements.
Chloe’s story is just one example of how a child might react to loss.
Following a loss, adults sometimes forget that young children who have never lost a loved one before may not know what death really is. For example, one little boy I saw in therapy lost his father when he was three. His grandfather told him that his daddy had gone “up there” and the grandfather pointed to the sky.
This little boy, who I will call Teddy, accepted this explanation — but then he started to regress. He became fearful of separations, he would not take a bath and his speech became babyish.
His grandmother brought him in to see me and in the first session, Teddy sat down in front of my doll house, took the daddy doll out and threw him behind the house. When I asked, “What happened to the daddy?”, he retrieved the doll and said, “The daddy’s on the roof”.
This is what he had understood when his grandfather had told him that “Daddy’s up there”.
He thought Daddy now lived on the roof of their house.
Young children know so little about the world. Everything is new — and this includes the concept of death. It is common for them to believe that when someone dies, they have just gone to live somewhere else and that they can come back.
Older children may understand that death is permanent, but they often believe that if a death occurs, it is someone’s fault. This can lead them to blame others — or themselves — if someone they love dies or leaves permanently.
When someone dies, children under the age five or six need frequent reminders about what has really happened. They need to be told that the person who died cannot come back, even if they might have wanted to. Fantasy is so powerful at this age that it can quickly replace a reality that is poorly understood (as well as being unwanted).
Children under the age of five or six need death to be explained to them in a concrete way, including the facts that when a person or animal dies, it cannot see or hear or breathe or feel anymore.
And when a child between the ages of six and 10 loses someone, they need a slightly more nuanced explanation of what has happened. They need to know the truth and they need to be told face to face, soon after the loss has occurred. They need to be told some details about the sort of illness or the event that caused the death. They also need to be reminded that the death was no one’s fault (if this is true).
Teenagers may seem like they don’t need much help following a loss. After all, they understand what death is, and they manage a great many feelings on their own already.
But whatever age a child is — from infancy through young adulthood, love and support are needed following a loss due to death.
When a teenager retreats to her room following a loss, when she looks at her phone when you try to talk to her about her feelings or about what is going on in the family, this is not an indication that she does not need your help.
Like kids of all ages, teenagers may feel uncomfortable talking about their feelings and they may feel awkward when feelings are talked about with them.
But don’t give up. Keep asking how your teen is doing, keep checking in on how they are feeling and keep letting them know how you are doing and feeling.
Part of this post is excerpted from my forthcoming book, How Children Grieve: What Adults Miss and What They Can Do to Help, published by Alcove Press.
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