Helping kids work through grief

I recently went to a 2 day seminar on helping children cope with grief and trauma at Bo's place . It's a fantastic facility doing amazing work, and they gave me permission to highlight some of the seminar's events online, since they are only local to Houston.

The first part of the seminar was understanding the grief response and mainly comes from J. William Worden.

Then they began to focus solely on kids, breaking the grief cycle up by ages and giving the following general advice (keeping in mind the age of the child):

• Answer questions honestly and openly--Avoid euphemisms bc the young child will view them concretely, and the older child will view you as inauthentic
• Allow child's own time table-don't push or lead the child into a certain direction
• Reflect back feelings (validate), and reassure concerns for safety
• Allow for repetition in discussion; each time a child repeats a story or part of a story, he/she is allowing himself/herself to feel and process the emotions associated with it a little bit more.
• encourage physical activity
• help child to connect with a support system
• be mindful of anniversaries
• encouraging kids to get the emotions out; if they are reticent, tell them to cry in the shower bc you're alone there and wet anyway
  

Much of the other general advice they give is what we give to all children--building trust, etc.

Activites and resources:

• Bring in an item of clothing from the family member who died and let the kids make a giant pillow out of it
• Monster Stomp
• Bring in concrete images for preschoolers (e.g. a dead leaf and a live plant)
• When Dinosaurs Die
• Write a letter to the person who died
• Anything from here
• Tear Soup
• Tibetan Prayer Flags--write on them things that you wish to tell the person who died, and then hang them outside (wind takes the prayer to God is the visual image)
• journaling
• make a grief garden (paper flowers attached to tongue depressors that you put in a flower pot with rocks in it--write on the flowers things that you appreciate or have learned from the grief)
• Journey Map--what landmarks or geographical things would you see on a map of your grief journey
• quilt squares
• Tri fold paper (past, present, future--how you feel)
• Fire in my heart Ice in my veins

There was much more, but it's tough to condense it into a blog post. Hope you can use some of it (and actually some of the activities could be tweaked for things other than grief).

Conferences and seminars

Lots of seminars coming up:

• Good Grief for Kids
• APCE--this one I'm attending more for networking and because a church member is receiving a lifetime achievement award
• Promiseland--having recently moved from Chicago, I'm not a huge fan of Willow Creek personally (megachurches just aren't my personal style, and frankly, Barrington has always struck me as a monoethnic suburban nightmare), but they do have great leadership conferences.

Anyone attending any of these?

Upcoming happenings

This has been a week of nonstop meetings and planning (what else is new?), but there are wonderful things happening:

• Weekend in the Word: adult lecture series, but the kids will also have a series which will be a multisensory look at parables
• Valentine's day dinner--an intergenerational event where the kids will actually be working the event.
• New children's worship pilot program to start in Lent (I can't express adequately on this blog how excited I am to see this one coming together).

Big Meetings

Ok, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth. The past few months have been filled with, well, Advent and Christmas, and then significant reading, researching, planning, praying, pulling my hair out, praying again...you get the picture. Blogging has been the last thing on my mind.

I've emerged not necessarily refreshed (I need a good vacation, really) but stoked and incredibly nervous at the same time for the exciting changes to come. This week is filled with meetings. Tuesday, we're planning Lent and Easter as a staff, which leads me into my next meeting--new Children's Worship!

For many months now, I've felt guided to change the children's worship at the church. As it stands now, children come in for the first 20 min of worship, have a "aw, look at the cuteypies" children's sermon, and then file out for less than 20 min of busy activities. Well, I take that back. That's what they used to do. Now we have a much better curriculum, but it still only lasts 20 minutes and is really more similar to Sunday School than to worship. There's no real worship going on. It's been nagging me for awhile, and now, we're planning something different.

We're starting with a pilot for Lent. We're pulling the kids out of the main worship service for the full time period (hear me out before you start groaning). The idea is to give them more of an emergent service, different from the traditional and even contemporary services now. Think of everything you know about emergent services (multisensory, visual, etc)--it mostly applies. Furthermore, we're comprising a group from our preteen ministry and teaching them about worship and about how to lead in worship, thus forming a worship team of these kids for drama, dance, music, prayer, etc. This team will actually start earlier than Lent, obviously. Then, on Palm Sunday, the kids (all kids) will join the adults, side by side, in leading worship. Emphasis will be placed on teaching the adults that the kids are not there for the "AW" factor but because they are members of the body of Christ and will lead side by side with the adults in the congregation.

The hope, then, is that if the pilot is well received (or mostly well), then in the Fall (summer is very slow in this community--many vacationers), the kids will spend 3 weeks out of each month in this type of worship, and then will lead and worship with adults on the 4th week. It will be a hybrid of sorts to begin with, with room to blossom into something more.

This is the vision; the meetings are Tuesday and Wednesday, so we will see what happens.

Also on the agenda is an intergenerational event, a Valentine's dinner. The kids will decorate, plan, and serve a catered meal to the adults who reserve a place. The older adults and many single adults and families are responding well to it, and the kids are excited about the opportunity to serve (well 90% of them, anyway). Some of the kids plan to serenade diners with piano, violin, and even recorder music. That meeting is Tuesday afternoon.

Much on the plate, and now I must sleep!

Quote of the day

"I grew up in church and still love God. I am one of the survivors. Many are not so fortunate."--Kathleen Chapman

Alive and well

I'm still here, but I've got a lot going on. Will post soon.

Hope everyone had a wonderful new year!