Can Minecraft’s virtual world help grieving children cope with real loss?
In the depths of the Nether — the eerie underworld of the video game Minecraft — 10-year-old Ivan darts through a maze of passageways to a torchlit chamber he calls his “secret room.”
Past rows of pews, he reaches a series of wooden signs he has made. Written in pixels are things he loved doing with his dad: Walking in the woods. Staying up late playing video games. Making a wooden shield. Ivan’s father died of a seizure-like illness two years ago. (His mother asked that I use only Ivan’s first name.)
Ivan built his secret room deep in the Minecraft underworld so no one else would see it. But he knows exactly where to find his chamber of happy memories — and to receive comfort if any sadness wells up.
Minecraft is a Lego-like virtual environment where players team up to cobble together cities, raise digital farm animals for food, and build fantasy castles in the sky. Ivan and other children are processing grief with support from a clinical therapist who meets them in a private area of the wildly popular video game.
Unlike violent shooter games, such as Call of Duty, Minecraft has been adapted by therapists as a tool to connect with children coping with mental health problems and to encourage social development in kids with autism. About two years ago, Meaghan Jackson, a certified music therapist based in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, wondered if this game might enhance her work with grieving kids.
What if they could express their feelings about a death — and discover they’re not alone — through group discussions and creative activities in their favorite video game?
Jackson developed the concept with support from her employer, the Lumara Grief and Bereavement Care Society, a Canadian nonprofit that offers counseling and camping retreats for bereaved families.
Launched in July 2022, the Minecraft Virtual Support Group for Grieving Kids is for children aged 7 to 12 who have experienced a loss — most often of a parent, sibling, or other close family member.
Jackson acknowledges that most kids already get plenty of screen time. But compared with in-person groups she has led for nearly two decades, “it is a lot easier to hold kids’ attention in Minecraft,” she says. In this familiar virtual world, children feel safe, she says, and “they are the experts.”
The Minecraft program, which has not been formally studied, is on the cusp of growing efforts to meet grieving children where they are — namely, online — and to respond to their urgent need for care.
One in 12 US children will lose a parent or sibling by the age of 18. This rate, calculated by the widely cited Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model, reflects a sharp increase in deaths from accidental drug overdose, gun violence, and COVID-19 from the start of the pandemic until 2021 (the most recent year for which such figures are available).
To join the five-day Minecraft program, each child needs a device for playing the video game online and a separate screen for talking on Zoom. The group’s private realm has space for eight or nine kids who log in from their homes across Canada.
At the start of each two-hour session, the children’s avatars gather in Minecraft around a crackling campfire. The first day, the children are quiet, unsure of what will happen next. So Jackson asks a simple question and doesn’t push for more. “Who are you remembering?” Many kids say, “Pass.” And that’s all the grief processing they’ll do that day before running off to build a digital tree house or play an avatar version of hide-and-seek.
Over the next four days, the children build structures and objects in the game tied to memories about the person they have lost: a brother’s baseball mitt, a mom’s favorite car. Or the music player Ivan added to the secret room for his dad. Just as adults find solace in making slideshows for a wake, making things in Minecraft helps children understand that even after a person is gone, their memories and feelings about that person — good and bad — hold meaning, Jackson says.
Being able to name the person who has died can help children begin to accept a loss, she says. Midweek in Minecraft, Jackson introduces the massive brick Memory Wall, where kids who feel ready will write the person’s name. Some might decorate the name with a simple candle, or not at all. “But usually they go all out — we’re talking flowers, fireworks. They end up looking like little shrines.”
Conversations bubble up. When Jackson asks a child what they used to call their parent or relative, another might say, “You called your dad Dada? I called my dad Dada — wait, how old were you when he died?” Exchanges like this help the children know they’re not alone.
While the kids are placing bricks or mining for flint, Jackson doubles as “DJ Nutmeg,” spinning songs by request. Music helps calm the nervous system, she says, and “holds space for difficult moments.” The kids’ favorite hits include “Believer” by Imagine Dragons. Asked how the song makes them feel, a child might say, “I don’t know. I just like it.” But the question plants a seed. Later, when they’re on their own, the kids remind themselves I can listen to this song.
Beckett Sherwood, 12, was the first to work with Jackson in the game. He started a year after his father died of stomach cancer, when Beckett was 9 years old. Before meeting Jackson, says his mother, Melissa Sherwood, “he had a really hard time talking about his father’s passing.” But being in the “safe, familiar” Minecraft environment “made it seem not so scary and difficult,” she says.
Months after joining Jackson’s Minecraft program, Beckett constructed a giant monument online emblazoned with his father’s name and the words “best dad ever in the world.”
Melissa says it’s been healing for Beckett to keep coming back as the group’s peer mentor, building maps of the realm to orient new kids and showing them how to make a boat or house. “He feels proud knowing he is helping other kids.”
Beckett says most kids open up by the end of the week. “They’re more chatty.”
On day five, the children scurry to fulfill their final mission: a guided tour of the structures they have built. Typically, at least one child will opt out, “which is fine,” Jackson says. But more often, she’ll see a child start the week not wanting to say who they are remembering — and five days later, “passionately explaining this beautiful memorial they built for that person.”
Jackson says the children’s responses to the Minecraft group have blown away anything she has seen in her 17 years of working with grieving kids. Before, she never had kids “beg to spend more time in a grief-processing group,” she says. “But it’s happening in this Minecraft realm.”
So far, very little research has been done to evaluate the long-term effects of online programs for bereaved children — or to identify which online models are most supportive for those with different needs.
However, research does show that the vast majority of bereaved children will not need intensive individual psychotherapy, says Julie Kaplow, a professor of psychiatry at Tulane University School of Medicine and executive director of the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute’s Trauma and Grief Center in Houston, which conducts research on childhood trauma and loss. What they need, Kaplow says, are healthy tools for coping with grief — ideally, starting in the first few months after a loss. Such tools include learning how to identify and regulate their emotions, turn unhelpful thoughts into healthy ones, and ask for support when they need it.
In a randomized controlled trial published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry in 2023, children who learned these skills in an intervention called the Family Bereavement Program were 67 percent less likely than those in a control group to have developed clinical depression 15 years later. But in the study, all 12 sessions of the program were in person.
With an aim to reach more kids, Kaplow is putting together an online version of this intervention with its codeveloper, Irwin Sandler, a research professor emeritus of psychology at Arizona State University. They plan to investigate whether an online coping program, to be launched in a few years, can replicate good outcomes for grieving children.
In the meantime, Jackson hopes to interest researchers in the Minecraft model.
The five-day program is not designed to be a “one and done” intervention, she adds. Each month, Jackson runs a two-hour meetup in Minecraft for children who want to come back. Like adults who lay flowers on gravestones, she says, children find comfort in visiting the online memorials they’ve built.
Ivan has kept in touch with the program for more than a year and a half, says his mother, Ariella.
After his father died, bedtimes were especially hard for Ivan. “Being alone in the dark would trigger a tearful wave of missing [his dad],” Ariella says. In the Minecraft group, she says, Ivan discovered that “other kids experience grief too.”
Besides support from family and friends, Ariella says, the Minecraft program has been Ivan’s main outlet for recording his memories of his dad and expressing his feelings about the loss.
Creating a secret room dedicated to his father “was reassuring” for Ivan, she says. “It’s his thing — a representation of his love. It’s also somewhere he can go back to,” she says, “and that has been really helpful.”