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).