How To Help Kids Grieve

We are currently in an unprecedented season in America with death and dying all around us due to COVID-19, the rioting in our cities, police violence against citizens, and citizen violence against the police. This doesn’t even begin to include the daily killings gone unchecked in the streets of cities like Chicago and Baltimore while city officials look the other way.

Regardless of what you think about it all, we can’t help but realize that behind every death there is a child who is impacted in some way. It might be a parent, a sibling, a grandparent, a teacher, best friend, or neighbor. How do they deal with these kinds of violent deaths?

How do children, in general, grieve when someone they love dies? These are children in homes, churches, and neighborhoods. Too often we ignore the grief of the children and spend most of our time and effort dealing with the adults who have been left behind.

We don’t know what to say to children, and unfortunately too often we say the wrong things. In this video, I am talking with Christian grief counselor Laura Diehl from Grieving Parents Sharing Hope (https://www.gpshope.org/) She shares excellent insight on how children grieve and what we can do to help them.

SKIP TO THE PLACES YOU WANT TO SEE BY CLICKING ON THE TIME STAMPS:

0:00 Introduction

3:05 Meet Laura Diehl and hear her tragic story

9:41 How Laura’s 9 year old granddaughter reacted to the death of her mother

19:01 Ways to comfort grieving children

21:46 What not to say, wrong beliefs and messages, nightmares

26:52 Grief is harder because of traumatic deaths

7:55 How do I know when my child needs a counselor?

30:30 Should kids pastors teach generically on death and grief pre-emptively in this season?

36:45 Why did my mom / dad / friend die? Why didn’t God stop it?

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