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Helping Children with Grief

By: Beth Thompson

Parents and adults often feel helpless when confronted with grieving children. It is often said that children easily recover, and that their grief is quickly forgotten and that adults also make excuses if they think that children are not showing what society thinks is the "correct" amount of grief

Children grieve differently than adults, above all they do not always cry when they are "expected". This means that you want the sad moments to be at appropriate moments that they do not consider appropriate.

Children's grief is stumbling and jumbled and unexplained in ways that adults are not always understanding. Children are also in each age phase also have different notions of death and define it differently. That is why it is especially important that you are concerned with the issue of death when a child is young and even has great trouble understanding the concept that someone is not going to be around any more.

Many parents and adults but lack the courage to explain death, parents want their children to be protected from sad feelings and do not want them to remember the person as being dead, so perhaps avoid allowing them to attend the funeral.

Children feel very closely what is happening around them, whether they can understand what "final" means: They may be struggling to comprehend loss and grief and realizing its consequences. The loss of a human being or even a beloved animal hits each child differently and the way they perceive and deal with it will be different. This is in addition to the age especially the relationship to the deceased person has a central role in how they handle the loss.

The decisive factors are also the circumstances in which someone died. In other words, it is something else when an old man dies after a long-time illness, when compared with the grief at the loss of a young brother or sister; children understand the difference and the shock or lack of shock just like adults do.

As we grieve with children they will better understand the finalality and the process by which our particular society deals with it. Mourning is an important part of grief, even if it is painful for the child, but at the same time there is no way to force them to mourn, they will find there own level even if you think that going out to play is not appropriate behaviour it may be their way of dealing with the change and the grief.

Some adults can not return to work for weeks or even months after bereavement, others throw themselves into it with extreme vigour working twice as many hours as before, children also have their own ways of dealing with the situation.

Not only mourning the death of a close person but also the mourning for a deceased pet should be taken seriously, children may or may not take the loss of a pet very badly and place it on a level with the death of a human.

Children should be free to choose whether they want to participate in the funeral. If they go, it is important that children at the funeral have been well prepared as to what they will see. Explain exactly what takes place and tell them also that often people will become emotional at funerals, as they may not be prepared to see an adult that they see as all powerful, crying. Explain also that there are various funeral rites that should be followed and that the corpse is sometimes on display depending on the particular religion and customs.

Article Source: http://www.mycontentbuilder.com

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