Raising Grieving Children

How children can survive the death of a loved one.

by Phyllis R. Silverman, Ph.D.

Invisible Mourners

There are many mourners when a family member or a friend dies If they are not part of the immediate family they often do not receive the attention they need. I call them "invisible mourners". We need to recognize the changes in their lives and help them deal with these as well as with their feelings not only immediately after the death but over time as well. Read More

Helping a Community Understand the Complexity of Grief

Grief is not an illness. Mourners have emotional reactions to the death of someone close to them. In additon they need to understand how the death changes their lives and learn to deal with these changes. Mourners need the support of friends, family and others in their community. To help we all need to see grief as a life cycle event. We need to educate our community. Read More

Learning a Language For Grief

There is a need to develop a new normal in a school that is grieving. Children need to learn a vocabulary for what they are feeling and help each other understand that there is no straight line as they cope. Read More

Newtown: Not Just a List of Names

Relationship to the deceased makes a difference in how various mourners respond. Each group deals differently. Where a member was killed, families grief is more intense and extended over time.. Help is important but more important over time There is no quick healing as they deal with their own pain, their other children's pain and the unreality of what has happened Read More

Keeping a Diary

Having children write down what they remember about the deceased and sharing it in regular family meetings is one way of following these changes and helping children understand that what they are experiencing is appropriate. Read More

When Grandpa Is Dying

Educating parents to communicate with children when a family member is dying. Read More

Father's Day Is Coming

Mother's Day and Father's Day are days that can cause great difficulty for school age children one of whose parents has died. Read More

Other Thoughts About Grief

I write blogs infrequently since it often takes me time to think through what might be relevant. It does help when I hear from my readers. I recently got a note from a reader, who was a psychologist and a mother mourning the death of her adult son. She was reacting to my questioning an article in which the author reported that grief is time limited. Read More

Expanding Our View of Grief

I recently read an article in the May 17th issue of the "New England Journal of Medicine". It was titled ‘Grief, Depression and the DSM-V”. The author stated that grief typically lasts from 2 to 6 months, after a death . In my mind this is in many ways a dangerous piece of misinformation. We seem to live in a world where we find it difficult to deal with pain, be it emotional or physical. Read More

When Teachers Face Grief in the Classroom

I saw an interesting movie yesterday, Monsieur Lazhar. This is a French Canadian film about how an elementary school, the students and their parents face the death of a teacher. Read More

When Someone Dies, Grief Follows as Day Follows Night

Parenting matters: Children need care, connection, and continuity. Read More

Grief Can Last a Lifetime

Is grief an illness? Read More

Writing a Blog Again

As I talk about what I have learned from others I have begun to appreciate what I learn from my own experience and my own stories. This is my story. Read More

Thoughts About 9/11

It is always interesting to think about where we were on an historic day, especially one that shook all our lives to the core. I was in Manchester, England on 9/11/2001 planning to give a talk about grief in children. It was hard to believe. I thought I was seeing a bad movie. There were no formulas, no easy answers. I went on to Dublin, Ireland from there. Read More

Men Who Grieve

It was with some excitement that I read the article on men and grief in the July 25th edition of the New York Times. It mentioned Widower: When Men Are Left Alone, which I had written with Scott Campbell, a text that is now 20 years old and still very relevant. Read More

Reflecting on Writing a Blog

As I think about writing a blog on raising grieving children I realize that sometimes I think there is nothing new to say. But then I realize how important it is to revisit issues already discussed. This is true because unfortunately there are always new families joining this population. There is often a time when death, out of turn in the life cycle, occurs. Read More

Finding Help

Writing a blog requires that I pay attention to all the opportunities that I can find to learn something new about children and how they grieve. I have said many times, that those I learn the most from are the bereaved families that I meet. This would also be true for parents who are learning about their own children's grief. Read More

Lessons Learned From Living

I call this blog lessons learned from living for a good reason. This past 2 weeks brought my family face to face with a sudden death. My husband' sister died 2 weeks shy of her 89th birthday. I keep saying it was unexpected and sudden. She had recovered from a stroke 6 years ago and the doctor said there were some residuals and he wasn't sure how much longer she could live. Read More

Remembering when a parent died

It is not often that I have the chance to read, in one week, two articles about the impact of their father's death on young men. These articles provided a unique perspective on the meaning of these deaths, years before, when the writers were 12 and 10 years old. The first article I read was Michael Zimmerman's address at Harvard's winter graduation. Read More

Children Need to Learn to Define Grief

I was recently rereading some of what Irwin Sandler and his colleagues at the Prevention Research Center at Arizona State University have written about helping grieving children. They suggested that children whose parent has died have to learn what it means to grieve, in other words to define this word. Read More

Explaining to Friends What Grief Is About

The book Milo should be read by every parent raising a grieving child. It is a book written for children who are in their early teens, even those a bit younger or bit older as well. Adults, judging from my experience, can learn a good deal from it as well. The book, by Alan Silberberg, is about his experience in school the year following his mother's death when he was 11. Read More

The Impact of Social Policy on Grieving Families

fter my last blog when I talked a bit about gun control, I began to think about other issues that are directly affected by congressional decisions that relate to how people grieve. I thought of two issues that need our attention. Read More

A NEW YEAR

It has been a while since I wrote a new blog. I have thought about it on a number of occasions and had some interesting ideas about things that needed to be said. I haven't written anything and now we are in the week between Christmas and The New Year. Holidays are difficult times for grieving families especially when there are children involved. Read More

Thinking about Tucson

The shootings in Tucson occurred two weeks ago. They continue to haunt me and I know from talking with friends and colleagues that I am not alone. This is my first attempt to sit down and put my thoughts on paper. I have to work at being coherent and making sense. I will do my best. My thinking takes me in two directions. Read More

A Conversation With Parents of Pre-Schoolers

How do children learn about death? How do they develop an attitude which allows them to acknowledge that people die and that feeling sad is an appropriate response to this loss? I wish that I had an easy answer to these questions. Read More

Taking Children to The Funeral

This past week a book group I belonged to read a book that led into a discussion of how death was dealt with in our own families as we were growing up. We recalled that as children we were usually not part of any family rituals when a family member died. Most of us grew up in homes where our parents felt that children had to be sheltered from this aspect of life. Read More

A talk at the Library

Last week I spoke at our local Public Library. I spoke to the librarian in charge of programming last spring to see if they would be interested in a reading from my book, "Raising Grieving Children". Read More

When Children Are Murdered

Last week I was in Colorado Springs, Colo. I spoke at the annual meeting of a mutual help group called Families of Homicide Victims and Missing Persons known to friends as FOHVAMP. Their website is www.unresolvedhomicided.org There were more than 300 people in attendance. All of these people experienced the death or disappearance of a family member or a friend. Read More

Magical thinking over the Years

On the anniversary of 9/11 there was an interesting article in the Boston Globe about a family in which the father was killed . The article mentioned how a school age child struggled to understand what happened to his father. For several years after the death he had a difficult time understanding that his father could not come back to life. Read More