Children & Loss Support
Guidance, tools, and heart-centered support for adults helping children navigate grief, change, and loss.
Explore approaches grounded in compassion and evidence-based grief recovery.
Why Children Need Adults Who Understand Grief
Children grieve differently than adults — their understanding of loss depends on age, experience, and emotional development. When we try to protect children from grief rather than help them express it, they can be left carrying unspoken pain into adulthood. Protect them may look like distracting, replacing their loss, avoiding the topic or acting as if all is well.
Facilitating healthy grieving in children not only helps them through the loss, but sets them up for a lifetime of grief resilience. Effective grief support for children:
Honors their emotional experience,
Helps them find expression for their feelings,
Teaches adults how to be present, open, and responsive,
Encourages adults to explore and heal their own relationship with loss and grief before or while they support children.
When Do Children Grieve?
Children go through grief not just after a death but with many kinds of losses — separation, moving, divorce, changing schools, as well as losing a pet. They can also have anticipatory grief before a loss. These experiences can shape how they feel, behave, and relate. This often looks very different from adult grief: they may express sadness through play, questions, regressions, or intense bursts of emotion rather than through words.
How Adults Can Support Children through Grief
The most important thing adults can offer is a calm, accepting presence where children feel safe to express whatever is in their heart — sadness, anger, confusion, or even moments of joy — without judgment or pressure to be “okay” or without attempts to distract of replace the loss. Rather than deflecting with logic or clichés, simply acknowledging feelings and allowing children to explore them helps build emotional trust and resilience.
Supporting a child in grief doesn’t require perfect words, but rather intentional actions — like using simple, direct language about loss, inviting creative expression through drawing or storytelling, maintaining familiar routines to provide stability, and creating space for remembering who or what was lost or celebrating the legacy and meaning of an anticipated loss. These approaches help children feel understood, grounded, and connected.
Adults don’t need to have all the answers — they need to know how to be with children in ways that help children feel seen and heard. Tools that teach adults how to hold space for emotion, recognize that repeated questions and expressions are part of processing, and support age-appropriate understanding are foundational to helping children move through grief in a healthy way.
How the Grief Recovery Method Helps
The Helping Children with Loss approach, grounded in the evidence-based Grief Recovery Method, shows adults how to move beyond “comforting statements” and toward real emotional engagement, helping the children in their care give voice to their feelings and complete the natural grief process, so it doesn’t become a silent burden carried into later life.
Part of the process of preparing oneself to assist children facing loss often includes the adult taking a look at their own ideas about and past experiences with grief. This can include exploring myths they may believe about grief and the way they typically deal with micro-losses and larger losses. This doesn't mean the adult needs to have it all figured out or healed their own unaddressed grief wounds. Self-awareness and the intention to help children navigate grief in a healthy way is enough.
Support Pathways for Adults Helping Children through Loss
If you’re helping a child through loss and aren’t sure where to begin, we’re here to help. Whether you’re a parent, caregiver, teacher, or mentor, our support pathways offer tools, understanding, and compassionate guidance rooted in evidence-based approaches.
Grief Support & Education
Individual and small-group grief support that helps adults understand their own relationship with loss and grief.
Helping Children with Loss
Learn to communicate with children about their feelings and support them to face their grief in a healthy, compassionate way.
Key Takeaways for Supporting Children through Loss Today
Routine and honest communication help children feel safe as they navigate grief.
Encourage questions.
Let children express feelings through art or play.
Reassure them that because they love deeply, their feelings — even sadness and confusion — are valid and natural.
Connect to Get Personalized Suggestions for Support
We’re here to walk with you. Reach out today to explore which supports might be most helpful for your situation.