When a Child Is Grieving

The seven-year-old comes into the kitchen on a Wednesday in February and asks where the cat is. Her mother, who has been bracing for the question all afternoon, says the cat died at the vet’s this morning. The child looks at her for what seems a long time and says, in a voice with no particular sadness in it, that her sleeves are wet. She goes upstairs. She does not cry. She does not mention the cat that evening. Two and a half weeks later, in the back of the car on a Friday, she asks, out of nothing, whether the cat is buried or burnt.

In our work, this kind of Wednesday comes up more often than the cultural script around grief in childhood would predict. Sometimes the loss is bigger than a cat; sometimes smaller. The pattern of the child’s response is similar across the range. Adults expect grief to look like the films. In children, it almost never does.

What is actually happening

Children grieve more things, and more often, than adults give them credit for. The cultural conversation is anchored to the death of a person, usually a grandparent. The clinical reality is wider. A child can grieve a pet whose presence in the house was the daily texture of feeling safe. She can grieve a nanny who has left, an au pair who has gone home, the class teacher who is changing schools, with an intensity adults rarely register because the cultural permission to grieve a nanny is thin. She can grieve a friend who has moved abroad, a house her family has left, an object lost on the train back from Cornwall and mourned for three weeks. None of this is precious; it is how attachment works. Something that was there is now not there, and the small system that learned to lean against it has to find new bearings.

Children rarely call it grief. They do not have the word, or they do, and the word does not feel like the thing. They have other languages. The wet sleeves and the question about burial. The sudden ferocious attachment to a different soft toy, what Donald Winnicott called a transitional object, the small held thing standing in for the larger held thing that is no longer there. The tummy ache, the sleep that goes wrong, the unprovoked fury about something else entirely. The grief is in the body and in sideways questions before it is in any sentence the parent would recognise.

Grief in childhood does not run in stages. Children grieve in waves: the loss is forgotten for an hour, an afternoon, two weeks, and then surfaces in a question on a Friday, and then is forgotten again. The forgetting is not denial but the nervous system pacing itself. A child who appears to be fine for a fortnight after a death is grieving in episodes, with the rest of childhood happening in between. Winston’s Wish, the UK’s leading bereavement charity for children, calls this puddle-jumping, and it is the most useful image we have come across for what a parent is actually watching.

What children of different ages do with loss

A chapter that tries to address the four-year-old and the sixteen-year-old in the same sentence ends up addressing neither.

If your child is between four and seven. Magical thinking is in full force. The child may, in flat language, ask whether the grandfather is in the ceiling, whether the cat will come back at Christmas, whether the nanny is sad in the country she has gone to. There is nothing morbid in the questions; the child’s mind is accommodating a new shape in the world. Answer briefly, truthfully, in the same voice you used to answer the question about where socks live. “Granddad’s body has stopped working and he is not going to come back. We can still talk about him.” Do not lean on euphemism (gone to sleep, passed, gone away). The child takes the metaphor literally; gone to sleep makes bedtime, that night and for a year, a small panic. Keep it truthful and short.

If your child is between seven and nine. Concrete thinking is sharpening. She wants to know what happens to the body, whether other people she loves will die, whether you might. She is beginning the long private calculation of mortality. Allow the questions without flinching. Yes, everyone dies eventually. Almost everyone lives a long time first. Then a reliable hand on the shoulder and a return to whatever the kitchen was doing. The reassurance she needs is not a speech; it is the discovery that the question did not break you.

If your child is between nine and eleven. She is beginning to grieve more privately. She knows her sadness has a social weight, and may decide her job is not to add to her parent’s. The signs are sideways: a sudden flatness, an irritability with siblings, a quietness in the car. The side-door conversation works better than the sit-down. “I have been thinking about Grandma this week. I wondered if you had.” Said while you are washing up, with both of you facing away. The naming gives her permission. Whether she takes it on this Tuesday is not the test.

If your child is in early secondary, eleven to thirteen. The peer group is now part of how she carries any feeling. She may not want her friends to know she has been crying about the cat, or the grandfather, or the friend whose family has moved to Singapore. Take the loss seriously without making her grief a household project. A quiet acknowledgement before she leaves for school. “I know today might be a hard one” is the right register. Loud sympathy at the breakfast table is the wrong one.

If your child is mid to late secondary, thirteen and beyond. Adolescent grief looks more like adult grief, with one difference: she is in the middle of separating from her family at the same moment she is being asked to lean back into it. Her response will be contradictory. She may want to be on her own and want you in the room two hours later. Be available without being insistent. The kitchen at night is where most of it gets said.

What to do, and what not to do

The single most useful thing a parent can do, across all these ages, is to make the loss namable: not insisting on the conversation, not scheduling it, simply making it possible. The child who hears the name of the dead grandfather spoken occasionally in the kitchen, without ceremony, learns that the dead can be talked about, and that the family has not become a place where his name is silent. The silence around the death does more damage than the talking ever does.

A parent of a younger child may find it helpful to keep one or two small tokens of the loss visible: a photograph on the kitchen shelf, the cat’s collar in the drawer the child knows about. As a permission rather than a shrine. The object says, without any words attached, “this happened and we do not pretend it did not”.

What is rarely useful: requiring the child to be sad on schedule. The funeral she does not want to attend, the assembly she does not want to sit through, the conversation on the anniversary the adults have decided is the right day. Grief in childhood does not consent to calendars. Offer the choice and accept the answer. The child who skips the funeral is protecting herself, accurately, not avoiding her grief.

Equally rarely useful: filling the silence with a better place, watching from heaven, “would not want you to be sad”. These sentences make the adult feel she has said the right thing; they do not, in our experience, reach the child. A simple “I do not know why this happened, and I am very sad about it too” is the line most children find more bearable.

Two organisations we send parents to almost without exception. Winston’s Wish bring to children’s grief a calmness and practical generosity we have not found in any other UK source; their pages on telling a child that someone has died, and on supporting a child through a funeral, are the clearest single primers we know in the country, and their helpline is warm and unhurried. Child Bereavement UK’s ground is slightly different: where the death is of a parent or a baby, or where the whole family system is grieving as a unit, their resources and helpline are the right pointer.

If you are considering bereavement counselling for your child, the BACP and NCPS directories let you filter for counsellors working specifically with children and with grief; the Winston’s Wish helpline will, in many areas, also know local services. Asking for help is not a verdict on how the grief is going.

Your own grief, and the longer arc

The parent reading this is, in many cases, grieving too. The grandfather was your father. The cat came into your life before the children did. The nanny was the person who helped you hold the early years together. The child is watching you, more closely than she lets on, to learn what grief is allowed to look like in this family.

She does not need you stoic, with it all in hand. She needs a parent who is sad in front of her sometimes, who lets her see the tears without asking her to do anything about them, and who is also, the rest of the time, the person she can lean against. You are both allowed to grieve. The two of you grieving in the same kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon, while one of you makes toast, is not a failure of parenting; it is what grief at home looks like.

What no one tells a parent in the middle of this is how long it goes on. The first six months are often the loudest. The second six months are often harder, because the family around you has stopped asking. The anniversaries, the empty chair at Christmas, the smell of a certain coat, will surface things you thought you had put down. They are not setbacks; they are how grief carries itself across years.

The seven-year-old who asked whether the cat was buried or burnt is, three Wednesdays later, a child for whom the cat is becoming a story. Not gone; not the same. She is finding a way for the cat to stay in her life without being in the kitchen. You are the person who lets her do that, by being unsurprised when she mentions it on a Friday and unsurprised when she does not. It is slow, and it is, mostly, enough.

NOTES

1. Sunderland, Margot. What Every Parent Needs to Know. DK, 2016. Sunderland’s developmental neuroscience for parents: body before brain, and the regulated nervous system as the regulating tool.

Where to go further

Julia Samuel, Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving A UK psychotherapist, Founder Patron of Child Bereavement UK, on what grief actually does to a person across the months and years. The cleanest single book on adult grief we know; the chapters on the death of a parent, a partner, and a child are the ones we send parents to.

Margot Sunderland, What Every Parent Needs to Know A UK clinical psychologist’s illustrated primer on what drives childhood emotion. The sections on loss, on bedtime, and on the rituals of repair pair well with Winston’s Wish material for parents seeing a grieving child through at home.