How to talk to your children about death and bereavement
It is Dying Matters week, and this annual awareness promotion is an opportunity to encourage people to talk about dying, death and bereavement.
With regular updates on the numbers of deaths linked to coronavirus in the media, we can’t underestimate the impact this may be having on our children. It’s possible that children will need time to mourn now, even if it is people they don’t know or have never met.
It can be particularly difficult to help a child grieve if you, too, are grieving. Bereavement can be complex for children, especially if they’re experiencing it for the first time. It’s common to feel things like confusion, numbness, loss of control and worrying that things will never be ok again. When someone dies, there’s no right or wrong way to feel. Everyone experiences loss or bereavement differently. But it’s important to help a child, especially if they have never lost someone before, to understand that it’s ok to have these emotions.
Children of different ages may also have different levels of understanding about what’s happened. Younger children could be more confused, thinking that someone has just gone away, whereas older children could realise that they’ll never see someone again, and could start to worry about life and death on a wider scale. The death of someone you care about can be very difficult for an adult, let alone a child. Nonetheless, grieving is not something to be rushed, and you should avoid putting pressure on yourselves to feel better straight away. Grief effects everyone differently, and lasts for
different lengths of time. The most important thing to do is to encourage the child or young person to talk to a trusted adult about how they’re feeling. They may just want to talk about the mixture of feelings that are troubling them, or the person that they miss. They might ask questions about why the person died, so it’s useful to have some answers ready suited to the child’s age and understanding.
It’s also useful to encourage children to express how they’re feeling. If they are upset, they could write a letter or draw a picture to the person that’s died, or if they are angry and frustrated then they can scream into a pillow. Remember you can always signpost a child to the Childline website, where they can have a 1-2-1 chat with a counsellor. Childline is free to call on 0800 1111.