When a Child Is Grieving

A seven-year-old comes into the kitchen on a Wednesday in February and asks where the cat is. Her mother, who has been dreading the question all afternoon, tells her the cat died at the vet’s this morning. The child looks at her for what seems a long time and then says, in a voice with no particular sadness in it, that her sleeves are wet. She goes upstairs and doesn’t cry, and she doesn’t mention the cat that evening. Two and a half weeks later, in the back of the car on a Friday, she asks out of nowhere whether the cat is buried or burnt.

In our work, we see this kind of response more often than the usual story about children and grief would predict. Sometimes the loss is bigger than a cat and sometimes it’s smaller, but children respond in much the same way. Adults expect grief to look like it does in films. In children, it almost never does.

What is actually happening

Children grieve more things, and more often, than adults give them credit for. When people talk about grief in childhood, they tend to mean the death of a person, usually a grandparent. Clinically, the range is much wider. A child can grieve a pet whose being there every day was part of what made home feel safe. She can grieve a nanny who has left, an au pair who has gone home or a class teacher who is changing schools, and feel it with an intensity adults rarely notice, because few people think of a nanny as someone a child might grieve for. She can grieve a friend who has moved abroad, a house her family has left, or something lost on the train back from Cornwall and mourned for three weeks. This is how attachment works: something she had come to rely on is no longer there, and she has to find her bearings without it.

Children rarely call it grief. Either they don’t have the word, or they do and it doesn’t seem to match what they feel. They show it in other ways: the wet sleeves and the question about burial, or a sudden, fierce attachment to a different cuddly toy. Donald Winnicott called a toy like this a transitional object, something she can hold that stands in for the bigger thing that is no longer there. It can also be a tummy ache, sleep that goes wrong, or unprovoked fury about something else entirely. Grief shows in her body and in indirect questions before it shows in anything she says that you would recognise.

Children don’t grieve in stages. They grieve in waves: the loss is forgotten for an hour, an afternoon or two weeks, then comes back in a question, and then is forgotten again. The forgetting isn’t denial, and a calmer spell doesn’t mean the grief has gone. She may be pacing herself, taking in only as much as she can bear. A child who seems fine for a fortnight after a death is grieving in episodes, with the rest of childhood going on in between. Child Bereavement UK, which Winston’s Wish is now part of, calls this puddle jumping, and it’s the most useful image we have come across for what you are actually watching.

What children of different ages do with loss

Advice that tries to speak to a four-year-old and a sixteen-year-old in the same sentence ends up helping neither, so we take each age in turn.

If your child is between four and seven. Magical thinking is in full force. She may ask, in a flat voice, whether her grandfather is in the ceiling, whether the cat will come back at Christmas, or whether the nanny is sad in the country she has gone to. There’s nothing morbid about these questions; she is working out how something new fits into her world. Answer briefly and truthfully, in the same voice you’d use to tell her where the socks live. “Granddad’s body has stopped working and he isn’t going to come back. We can still talk about him.” Don’t rely on euphemisms (gone to sleep, passed, gone away). She will take them literally, and gone to sleep makes bedtime a small panic, that night and for a year.

If your child is between seven and nine. Her thinking is becoming more concrete. She wants to know what happens to the body, whether other people she loves will die, and whether you might. She is beginning a long, private reckoning with the fact that people die. Let her ask, and don’t flinch. Yes, everyone dies eventually. Almost everyone lives a long time first. Then put a hand on her shoulder and go back to whatever you were doing. What reassures her is seeing that the question didn’t break you.

If your child is between nine and eleven. She is starting to grieve more privately. She knows her sadness affects the people around her, and may decide it’s her job not to add to yours. The signs are indirect: she goes suddenly flat, gets irritable with her siblings, or hardly speaks when you’re driving her somewhere. Talking while you are both doing something else works better than sitting her down. “I’ve been thinking about Grandma this week. I wondered if you had.” Say it while you’re washing up, with both of you facing away. It tells her she can talk about Grandma too, and it doesn’t matter whether she does that day.

If your child is in early secondary, eleven to thirteen. What her friends think now shapes how she handles any feeling. She may not want them to know she has been crying about the cat, or her grandfather, or the friend whose family has moved to Singapore. Take the loss seriously, but don’t make her grief a household project. A brief word before she leaves for school, such as “I know today might be a hard one”, strikes the right note. Loud sympathy at the breakfast table strikes the wrong one.

If your child is mid to late secondary, thirteen and beyond. Grief at this age looks more like adult grief, with one difference: she is in the middle of separating from her family at the same time as she is being asked to rely on it again. Her response will be contradictory. She may want to be on her own, and then want you in the room two hours later. Be available, but don’t push. Most of it gets said at home, late at night.

What to do, and what not to do

Across all these ages, the single most useful thing you can do is make it possible to talk about the loss. Don’t insist on the conversation or schedule it; just make sure it can happen. A child who hears her dead grandfather’s name said now and then at home, without ceremony, learns that the dead can be talked about, and that his name hasn’t become something the family avoids. The silence around a death does more damage than talking about it ever does.

With a younger child, you may find it helps to keep one or two small reminders of the loss where she can see them: a photograph on a shelf, or the cat’s collar in a drawer she knows about. They’re there to show her it’s all right to remember, not to make a shrine. Without any words, the object says “this happened, and we don’t pretend it didn’t”.

What rarely helps is making her be sad on schedule: going to the funeral she doesn’t want to attend, sitting through the assembly she doesn’t want to sit through, or having the conversation on the anniversary because the adults have decided it’s the right day. Children’s grief doesn’t keep to a calendar. Offer the choice and accept the answer. A child who skips the funeral is protecting herself, and she’s right to; she isn’t avoiding her grief.

Filling the silence with a better place, watching from heaven or “wouldn’t want you to be sad” rarely helps either. These phrases make the adult feel she has said the right thing, but in our experience they don’t reach the child. Most children find a simple “I don’t know why this happened, and I’m very sad about it too” more bearable.

Almost without exception, the organisation we send parents to is Child Bereavement UK. Its approach to children’s grief is calm and generous with practical help in a way we haven’t found in any other UK source, and its pages on telling a child that someone has died, and on supporting a child through a funeral, are the clearest guides we know of in the country. It also covers the death of a parent or a baby, and whole families grieving together. Its Helpline is 0800 02 888 40, free, Monday to Friday 8am to 8pm, excluding bank holidays, and it is warm and unhurried.

If you are considering bereavement counselling for your child, the BACP and NCPS directories let you filter for counsellors working specifically with children and with grief; the Child Bereavement UK Helpline will, in many areas, also know local services. Asking for help is not a verdict on how the grief is going.

Your own grief, and the longer arc

In many cases, you are grieving too. The grandfather was your father, the cat came into your life before the children did, and the nanny was the person who helped you get through the early years. Your child is watching you, more closely than she lets on, to learn what grief can look like in your family.

You don’t have to be stoic, with it all in hand. She needs a parent who is sometimes sad in front of her and lets her see the tears without asking her to do anything about them, and who is also, the rest of the time, the person she can lean on. If the two of you are sad together while one of you makes toast, you haven’t failed as a parent. That is what grief at home looks like.

What no one tells you, in the middle of it, is how long it goes on. The first six months are often the most intense. The second six months are often harder, because the family around you has stopped asking. Anniversaries, the empty chair at Christmas and the smell of a particular coat will bring back things you thought you had put behind you. That is how grief works over the years, and it doesn’t mean you have gone backwards.

Three Wednesdays later, the seven-year-old who asked whether the cat was buried or burnt is starting to turn the cat into a story. She still thinks about it, but differently. She is finding a way to keep the cat in her life now that it isn’t in the house. You make that possible by being unsurprised when she mentions it and unsurprised when she doesn’t. It takes time, and for most children a parent who responds like this is enough.

NOTES

1. Sunderland, Margot. What Every Parent Needs to Know. DK, 2016. Sunderland’s developmental neuroscience for parents: body before brain, and the regulated nervous system as the regulating tool.

Where to go further

Julia Samuel, Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving A UK therapist and Founder Patron of Child Bereavement UK on what grief does to a person over months and years. It’s the clearest book on adult grief we know, and the chapters on the death of a parent, a partner and a child are the ones we send parents to.

Margot Sunderland, What Every Parent Needs to Know An illustrated guide, by a UK child therapist, to what drives children’s emotions. The sections on loss, on bedtime and on the rituals of repair work well alongside Child Bereavement UK’s material if you are helping a grieving child through it at home.