Each child grieves in different ways. Other than the fact that all children have unique personalities and viewpoints, additional factors that influence their reactions to loss can include their age, environment, previous experiences, and prior understanding of death (if they have any).
Children can exhibit various emotional and behavioral reactions termed as traumatic grief responses. These responses can persist throughout their remaining childhood years and into adulthood.
It’s crucial to take your child to traumatic grief therapy when they’re coping with loss to support the best outcome for their future emotional health. At the Alabama Free Will Baptist Children’s Home, we provide a haven of hope to children struggling with the many difficulties that life can bring. Keep reading for our approaches to help them heal and move forward after losing a loved one.
Traumatic Grief Responses
Children might develop traumatic grief responses to cope with the loss of a close relative or companion. The connection between trauma and grief symptoms can coexist throughout a child’s developmental stages.
These symptoms even escalate the potential for underlying mental health issues, impaired learning abilities, and behavioral issues that are often misunderstood by family members, teachers, and other children.
Behavioral Responses
In childhood traumatic grief, a child will typically adopt behaviors that help them feel safe, even if they are not the ideal means of coping. These behaviors serve as a way to regain control in the absence of a loved one. Here are a few examples of the behavioral responses children in grief can exhibit:
- Abnormal sleep patterns
- Changes in appetite
- Social isolation
- Mood swings
These behaviors can have a long-lasting effect on a child’s mental well-being that leads to avoidance and numbing, physical symptoms like headaches or stomachaches, and intrusive thoughts surrounding death. It’s essential to help your child identify their feelings early on and encourage them to find positive outlets for managing them.
Therapeutic Coping Strategies for Children with Traumatic Grief
Traumatic grief therapy is an umbrella term for interventions aiming to help children navigate their feelings when losing a significant figure in their life. Support from a safe adult is essential to a grieving child’s healing journey.
Again, every child is different, so it’s necessary to create a variety of activities that will help them understand their feelings. Here are a few strategies to encourage healthy coping:
Express Feelings with Age-Appropriate Activities
Ask your child how they feel and encourage them to answer through one of the following activities, organized by age appropriateness.
For Older Kids: Share a Journal
Encourage older children to share their feelings with a shared journal. You can take turns passing the journal back and forth, judgment-free, and privately, to talk about feelings without the pressure or anxiety of emotional, face-to-face discussions.
Many children enjoy this method of communicating and connecting over a loss with their parents, getting ample time to think through the things they want to articulate.
For Younger Kids: Prompt Drawings or Sculptures
Younger children might not know the words to express their feelings or how to write them down, but you can offer them other options, like drawing or sculpting with clay. Give them specific prompts for drawing or sculpting.
You can come up with whatever prompts you think are age-appropriate. A few great prompt examples include instruction to draw or sculpt: a memory connected to what they’re feeling, something that reminds them of their feelings, something that makes them feel better, how they would like to feel, or something they think is confusing, or people in their family who have supported, inspired, and encouraged them.
For Two or More Kids of All Ages
If you have multiple children, you can create a ‘Question Jar’ where they can anonymously write down questions about why they might feel the way they do. You can give your answers to these questions to all of the children without disclosing who wrote what.
This activity will help your children learn that it’s okay to have questions and confusion, that they’re not alone in that, and that their parents are the safe confidants to ask.
“Finding Your Center”
Encourage your child to try breathing exercises during stress and anxiety, leading by example. Doing the exercises with your child is often more motivating than just telling them to do it.
- Take 10 deep and slow breaths, breathing in through the nose and exhaling through the mouth.
- Find things in the room from A to Z. Start with A, then B, and so on.
- After you help them find calm, encourage your child to engage in a healthy activity that helps them find their “happy place.” Advise them to do this with activities that engage their mind or body, instead of empty distractions like scrolling on touchscreen devices, binge eating, or napping mid-day.
Honor Your Lost Loved One’s Memory
There are many ways to honor your lost loved one’s memory that can be therapeutic for your grieving child. Here are a few we recommend trying:
- Make a memory box with items the child associates with the person who has passed. These items could include pictures, notes, or other keepsakes.
- Plant a flower or a tree in their memory to symbolize growth and continuity of life.
- Create a family cookbook of recipes that reminds your child of their favorite memories of breaking bread or cooking with their lost loved one.
Clinical Traumatic Grief Therapy
In addition to teaching your child coping techniques at home, it’s also essential to consider having your child go to clinical traumatic grief therapy with a professional counselor—especially if you are also in active mourning or otherwise cannot provide the emotional support your child needs.
These approaches are evidence-based practices that involve structured therapeutic techniques designed to help children cope with loss and trauma:
- Multidimensional grief therapy. Recognizes that children experience grief reactions in three domains: identity distress, circumstance-related distress, and separation distress. A professional grief counselor facilitates this treatment with a framework reference and assessment-type tool that interprets distress levels across each domain.
- Grief and trauma intervention. Developed for children between the ages of 7 and 12 who have witnessed or been victims of violence or disaster. There is a program, trauma and grief component therapy for adolescents, that is individualized for older children and teenagers.
- Trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, tailored to childhood grief and trauma (TF-CBT). Acknowledges that trauma requires addressing before moving on to the grieving process.
Support for Parents with Grieving Children
Approaching a child who is coping with the loss of a loved one requires sensitivity, understanding, and consistent support. Loss is never easy for a child because their emotional and behavioral skills are still developing. The best thing you can do is show them that they are loved. We see that often at the Alabama Free Will Baptist Children’s Home, with varying circumstances.
We provide counseling services for children, adults, and families in Alabama. We also offer low-cost services for those who cannot afford professional support. For more information or questions about traumatic grief therapy, please reach out to us today.