Get More Info About Dr. Robyn Here: http://www.DrRobynSilverman.comHow to Talk to Kids about Managing Childhood Grief In this podcast, Dr. Robyn Silverman interviews Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor, Katie Lear, about how we can help kids to manage childhood grief. Using specially-designed activities and discussion points, children can open up about a variety of feelings and learn that they can confide in us about the tough stuff- even when it’s hard to hear. Childhood is supposed to be filled with good times and laughs—but of course, some children may experience a significant loss during their childhood or adolescence. It’s actually more common than you might think. According to the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model, as of 2021, one in 14 American children will experience the death of a parent or sibling before the age of 18. Still, it’s not easy to talk about grief with adults, let alone kids—but as the key adults in our children’s lives, we need to be able to step in and navigate the thoughts and feelings that they are experiencing as they cope with their loss. They likely will have many questions when a grandparent, parent, sibling, or other close family member or friend dies. They might wonder if they are at fault if they are safe and who will make their grilled cheese sandwich and take them to soccer if the person who passed away was the one who did those things for them. When we shut down, don’t talk about grief and death with kids or make the mistake of assuming if they aren’t talking about it, they must be fine, kids can wind up filling in their questions with their own answers based on misunderstandings and incorrect information. We need to help them get the conversation going through a variety of techniques that allows them (and also us!) to manage grief in productive ways. We’ve discussed talking about death and grief with Joe Primo, in the past, and we’ve talked about suicide with Dr. Dan Reidenberg and Dr. Jonathan Singer—and now we will discuss grief through a new lens with Katie Lear who uses child-friendly activities to comfort kids and help them to overcome sadness, fear, and loss. Katie Lear is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor, Registered Drama Therapist, and Registered Play Therapist based in North Carolina. She combines creative play with research-based tools to help children, tweens, and teens cope with anxiety and trauma. Katie brings her expert knowledge to her new book, A Parent’s Guide to Managing Childhood Grief, as she walks through important topics like how different children grieve, how to talk about death, and what signs to look out for during the grieving process. And today, we’ll also discuss the tools you need to connect with your child and move toward healing and acceptance as a family when your child is grieving a significant loss. Important Messages: • Grief: It’s not all heavy, even when the subject is heavy. • Topics are hard to discuss- and if we can’t talk about them as adults, how are we going to talk about them with kids? • How children grieve: Grief can look different both in age and in development, because we know too that, two 12 year olds can be very different in terms of where they’re at maturity wise. I think knowing how children grieve is really helpful because it doesn’t always look the way thaewe would expect. For a long time, like in the Freudian days and a little bit after, there was this assumption that children were not capable of grieving! Assumption: they didn’t have the psychological maturity yet to really understand what death is. But we know now that even little children who haven’t fully figured out conceptually what death means in a permanent way still can grieve the loss of somebody in their life. • Preschoolers: They can use play to talk about their loss. Children this age really have a hard time grasping that death is a permanent state. They may have some understanding of death, but it’s coming from cartoons, it’s coming from movies, it’s coming from Disney. So they may have beliefs or images that come to mind about death for them that are not totally accurate. Children this age may ask repeatedly when a loved one is coming back because they are not old enough yet to really grasp that death is permanent. And you may see that grief coming out in behavior and coming out in play– hard time putting their feelings into words– but we might see it come out through reenacting scenes in play or by regressing. We’ll often see kids that age acting younger and picking up habits from earlier developmental stages as a way of trying to feel more secure. So that could look like having a hard time sleeping alone, potty training issues, thumb sucking. • And then as the kids are getting older and they have more of an understanding of what death is, grief can still look different. Major rollercoaster. And I, I often hear from people like, they were fine a moment ago and then they were not fine. And I, I don’t kno
from Dr. Robyn Silverman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aceSflmK1To
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