Helping Children with Loss

I remember when my oldest daughter was a baby, and my husband found me staring down at her crying.  He asked what was wrong, and I replied, “Someday someone is going to hurt her feelings!”  I laugh about that scene now. Of course someone was going to hurt her feelings over the long trajectory of her life! What I really meant but couldn’t quite put into words was that I loved that tiny baby with my whole heart and soul, and I felt a fierce desire to protect her from anything bad ever happening to her. Most parents can relate, I’m sure.  But of course bad things were going to happen to her. That’s how life goes for every one of us!

In the Disney movie Finding Nemo, Nemo’s Dad Marlin was extremely protective of his son after his wife/Nemo’s mother was killed by a predator fish. He didn’t ever let Nemo do anything in order to keep him safe. One day their fish friend Dory said to Marlin, “Well, you can’t never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him.”  Try as we might, we can’t shield our children from all negative experiences. And truthfully, we wouldn’t want to. They would grow up to be adults who had no idea how to deal with the negative experiences that inevitably befall us in adulthood.  So the best we can do is to learn how to help them deal with challenges in life like loss, change, and transition.

LOSS IN CHILDHOOD

The most common losses in childhood include: death of a pet, death of a grandparent, parents’ divorce, and moving. You don’t have to let your imagination wander long before coming up with a long list of losses, changes, or transitions you experienced as a child or your children have faced. Sometimes as adults we struggle to process these things for ourselves. So, we have no idea how to help our children process them either. And by children, I mean toddlers through adolescents through young adults.

Grief is cumulative and adds up over our lifespan.  My daughters went to a middle school where there were no lockers. They had to carry all their school supplies and books around in giant backpacks. Consequently, they developed back issues due to this extra weight on their shoulders all the time. I like to think about loss as a rock in a backpack. If my pet cat dies, and I don’t deal with those emotions, it goes into my backpack. If Grandpa dies, then there’s another rock in my backpack. That backpack is getting heavy, and I have to make accommodations to make the backpack comfortable. Toss a few more rocks in the backpack when my big brother moves out to go to college, I experience my first breakup, and I don’t get into my dream college.  If I’ve never dealt with the emotions that come with all these things, I’ve got a really heavy backpack. That’s a tough way to start out adult life!

If we can teach our kids how to take the rocks out of their backpacks as they go, they’ll never have that build up of unprocessed emotions and grief. Yes, difficult things will happen in life. But if children know they have the skills to deal with challenges, they can face adulthood with a lot more confidence.

HELPING CHILDREN WITH LOSS CLASS

I’m excited to announce that I am offering a new course called Helping Children with Loss.  This class is 10 instructional hours taught over 4 weekly sessions. This course is for adults who have children/teens/young adults  in their lives. This includes parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, counselors, school administrators, coaches, youth pastors, church leaders, and the list goes on and on. I am so excited about this!  Wouldn’t it be great to be equipped with these skills to teach our kids, so that they grow up learning how to process the emotions that come with the more difficult sides of life? I am grateful to have these skills now, but oh how I wish I had them when my daughters were little.

This class covers misconceptions we believe about grief, coping mechanisms commonly used to try to keep grief at bay, and several fantastic specific action items you can use to help on an individual level. Tuition also includes the book “When Children Grieve.” You know your child best, and you can be the best at helping them navigate their tough spots in life.

This class is good for people who are in the midst of a current loss or big life shift. Although, sometimes it’s tough to have the time or emotional bandwidth for a bunch of new information when you’re right in the thick of it.  So, it’s also a great class for you right now so when those tough times hit, you are prepared right out of the gate to best support your child.

I am excited to share more on this topic here in the future.  For more information, please see the Helping Children with Loss tab HERE under Grief Recovery.

To stay up to date on my class dates and registration, sign up for my newsletter and follow me on instagram @kellynortoncoaching, or get in touch with me on my contact page.

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There is No Good Card for This

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Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie