Grief can be one of the most difficult things for a child to experience. Whether they lose a parent, sibling, friend, or pet, their grief responses and understanding of death and significant loss differs greatly from the responses and understandings that adults experience. Children do not possess the same vocabulary, emotional tools, and cognitive abilities as adults when it comes to articulating their emotions. They often find themselves frustrated and confused with their internal processes, resulting in behavior issues and feelings of uncertainty on the part of the child’s caretaker or parent. Child therapy can be a very valuable tool in aiding the grieving child and help them understand their own feelings and issues in a safe way.
Understanding How Children Grieve
Grief in children is not an event that happens in a chronological sequence. The manner of exhibiting grief may be emotional, behavioral, or physical, depending on factors such as the age, developmental level, and individuality of the child. In some cases, younger children display sadness in forms such as becoming more attached to their parents, experiencing nightmares, and regressing in their achievements. Anger, being withdrawn from others, and lack of concentration may be the indicators of grief in school-going children.
In the absence of proper guidance, the symptoms may last for a long time and adversely impact various aspects of children’s lives, including their emotional well-being, academic achievement, and social relations.
Why And how Therapy Works
The process is helpful in that it creates a safe space for children to work through their emotions. Therapists trained in bereavement counseling have knowledge of the appropriate ways of helping children deal with grief using techniques based on the child’s age, which may include play therapy, art therapy, and story telling.
Another way in which therapy can help is that a therapist can teach children about coping mechanisms that help in dealing with stress. It enables them to learn about identifying their emotions, to know that their reaction is part of the normal grieving process, and how to appropriately handle these emotions.
Professional Guidance vs. Well-Meaning Advice
Grief can be one of the most difficult things for a child to experience. Whether they lose a parent, sibling, friend, or pet, their grief responses and understanding of death and significant loss differs greatly from the responses and understandings that adults experience. Children do not possess the same vocabulary, emotional tools, and cognitive abilities as adults when it comes to articulating their emotions.
They often find themselves frustrated and confused with their internal processes, resulting in behavior issues and feelings of uncertainty on the part of the child’s caretaker or parent. Child therapy can be a very valuable tool in aiding the grieving child.
Child therapy is essentially family therapy, because the goal of therapy with children is not solely for that child alone, but rather a means of creating a context in which healing occurs because family is part of the therapy experience and critical to long-term positive results.
This can be explained through the role the therapist takes as a clinical consultant, linking the child’s interior emotional experience with the exterior, familial world by providing the parent/caregiver with unique insight and tools to process loss, trauma, life transitions, etc.
The family context allow the therapist to construct a custom-tailored prescription for continued growth, allowing the parents to not only learn a new kind of “behavioral language” unique to their child, but to receive concrete strategies on how to communicate in ways they previously thought impossible or unmanageable.
In this way, the work that is done within a fifty-minute session is fortified at home and there is no longer a focus on the child as an “identified patient” but on the family working together as a team.
It also serves the parents and other family members as well to work through their own issues along with their child; they develop a family’s emotional intelligence in which they are able to better process their own emotional reactions in order to better understand and comfort their child.
It is as if the family as a whole not only recovers from their child’s immediate pain, but develops the psychological resilience for future emotional crises.
Conclusion
Grief is a part of life, it can be natural, confusing and difficult for a child to face and make sense of on their own. Play therapy or child therapy is an age-appropriate, research-based and supportive method of dealing with a child’s grief, enabling them to express their emotions and recover in a healthy way.
A child therapy session gives children a safe and secure place in which to experience their emotions and learn coping skills and strategies from the guidance of a therapist. This enables a child’s grief to be resolved positively, giving them greater emotional security and resilience.
If parents and caregivers have lost a child, and live in Qubec or further afield, taking that step to look into child therapy is arguably the most loving and effective way to guide your child through the grieving process and enable them to feel as if they have been heard, understood and supported throughout this difficult time.