What I Wish I Knew about Helping Children with Loss when My Daughters Were Younger

I am the mother of four daughters who range in age from 16-25. They are the joy of my life, and I am grateful to have strong, loving relationships with each of them.  And I don't write this to beat myself up in any way -- I was doing the best I could with the knowledge that I had. But here are a few things I wish I had known from the start.

Grief manifests itself during loss and change.

We were -- and still are -- a pet family. I knew that when a pet died, there would be grief. I didn't have the same realization about the feelings associated with change. So when we moved, and one daughter in particular had a really hard time with it, I dealt with it more as an attitude to be changed. If she just had a better attitude about it, it would be fine. I wish that I had understood that sometimes it's really hard to change your attitude until you process the emotions you are feeling -- and I was basically telling her not to have those emotions.

I wonder how it would have gone if instead, I had confessed that I, too, was struggling with the move and had conversations about why it was hard and what we could do about it instead of trying to force her to have a good attitude in order to help myself feel good about a decision that I wasn't actually feeling very good about. She could have seen me modeling how to deal with the emotions that come with difficult change, instead of seeing me model how to stuff our real emotions down and pretend that everything is fine.

Be quicker to validate than to give perspective.

As adults, we don't always give credit to the reality of our child or teen's emotions because we are so far removed from that stage that we forget what it feels like -- those emotions are big. Sometimes we try to solve for our child's emotions by giving them our adult perspective -- if they could only see things the way we see them with our years of experience and wisdom, they wouldn't be upset at all.

So when one of our daughters had a break-up and my husband said, "Don't worry, high school relationships never last anyway," mysteriously, that did not help her feel better. Or, when a friend moved away and I said, "At least you can face time! When I was your age, we had to write actual letters," somehow being grateful for technological advances did not alleviate her heartache over her friend leaving. You can't logic your way out of grief -- not. your own, and not your child's. 

What if, instead, we had tried to put ourselves back in our teenage shoes and said, "I remember getting broken up with in high school, and it sure didn't feel very good." Or "When I was ten, my friend moved to California, and I remember feeling so lonely." We might have built more of a connection, and opened up opportunities for them to talk about how they are feeling, where when we try to logic them out of it, we just make them end up feeling wrong for having the emotions in the first place.

Grief you thought was solved might come up again.

When my youngest daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at age 7, she responded with an astoundingly positive attitude. After her 3-day hospital stay, I remember her saying, "All I have to do is prick my finger, check my sugar, count my carbs, and take a shot of insulin? That's easy!" and being shocked by her pragmatic positivity, but I thought well, good! She adapted and accepted her diagnosis very quickly.

And she had. But, over time, as kids grow and develop more understanding and maturity, it makes sense for new grief to come up over old things. There have been times in the 9 years since her diagnosis that diabetes has felt like a much heavier burden than she thought it would. This is to be expected, but I didn't necessarily realize that.  

Another example of this was when my daughter's cello teacher died. Charlene was my daughter's first cello teacher when she started playing at age 5, and we said goodbye to her when we moved from Oregon to Arizona a few years later. We hadn't really kept in touch with her (my fault), but as a teen my daughter wanted to reach out, and we discovered that Charlene had died earlier in the year. My daughter was devastated, and I was surprised by her reaction since we hadn't stayed close, and it had been many years since they were teacher and student. What happened was that my daughter was old enough to realize what a gift this teacher had been and how much of a hand Charlene had in developing her into the gifted cellist that she became. Charlene became more valuable to her than she even was when we moved, and the loss of not being able to tell her what that meant to her and how thankful she was broke my daughter's heart. We often think of grief as something to check off our list, when it's really something that can be very fluid as kids develop and grow.

When I got certified to teach my Helping Children with Loss class, I was so excited about it because as a mom of older kids, I could look back and see so many times and ways I could have used the tools when my kids were younger. I can still use them with my teens and adult children, but I would have loved to have had that information and the confidence to know what to say and do from the start.

Helping Children with Loss is a 10-hour class, taught over 4 weeks. This is an interactive class taught live over Zoom. It is ideal for parents, grandparents, and other family members, but it's also wonderful for people who work with children professionally -- teachers, school administrators, coaches, youth leaders, etc. CE credit is available.

For more information contact me or see my Helping Children with Loss page HERE.