Reply to Grieving kids

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "Grieving kids"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Hi op. A great book on death for kids is Lifetimes https://www.amazon.com/Lifetimes-Beautiful-Explain-Death-Children/dp/0553344021

The best advice is to be honest, clear (no saying she is sleeping, or vague things this just scares kids). It is also ok and normal for your kids to feel anxiety and fear that this could happen, what I use to try to help my children through anxieties like that is think through yes, it could happen, but is it likely? No.. it's pretty rare. It is a helpful tool for all things that give us anxiety. To do a check-in with yourself on how likely it is to happen. I use this a lot so that they have it as a tool generally.

So for example, when they hear something about a fire in a house and then later are saying they are worried that could happen to us. I might say - oh yeah.. I understand. Hearing about that fire it makes a lot of sense to me you might be wondering if that could happen to us. It could, fires do happen, but it's not likely. It's rare. To make it concrete when they were little I would give an example - for example how long has great grandpa been alive? (kid: 93 years!) do you know if he has ever been in a fire? I can tell you - he hasn't. Not in his whole life! 93 years! What about great grandma? She hasn't either! and neither have daddy or I. So it really is pretty rare. So it could happen, and sometimes i worry about that too but it helps me to think about how rare it is. Now, when something comes up I can say yeah that makes me nervous too, how likely do you think it is that iwll happen to us though? and he will think about it and say hm yeah not likely... These are techniques we give adults in CBT when they have anxiety so I figure why not teach kids to ask those same questions to themselves. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics