Key to coping with loss: helping children stay on development trajectory

This resource is also available in Spanish

The novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy famously opens with the line, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Institute Children’s Grief Center therapist Paula Casas says her clinical work has borne that out.

“I always tell families that everyone grieves differently,” says Casas, one of about 14 therapists who work with the Institute’s Children’s Grief Center. “Grief comes in a lot of forms, shapes and sizes, and so does the amount of time it takes to adjust to the new normal.”

Grief is inevitable in life, but not everyone needs grief therapy. Casas and others at the Center assist children to address traumatic situations, including loss of life due to accidents or violence. They also counsel parents on how to support children in a time of loss.

Death and divorce are the most common reasons clients come to see Casas and other therapists in the Children’s Grief Center. In either case, a key goal is to insure children stay on or return to their own developmental trajectory.

“Kids are usually resilient,” Casas says. “If there’s trauma, it’s more difficult. If the relationship was difficult, there may be more things to work through in addition to the loss of the person. But in a lot of circumstances with the right support of families, kids will heal.”

Grief comes in waves

Casas finds outdated the idea of grief “stages” — denial, anger, acceptance — proposed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Instead, she says, many children experience grief in waves. They can come unexpectedly, and the intensity and duration can vary but “they all eventually die down,” Casas says. “I tell my clients that, ‘we need to become good surfers.’”

In general, she says, children handle grief in shorter spurts than adults. It’s not uncommon that a child might have a meltdown dealing with a grief one evening, and be ready to go to a play date the next morning, for example.

Following parents’ lead

Parents’ reactions are a key influence on how children grieve when they lose someone close to them. On one hand, children take their cues from parents in whether to grieve and how openly.

On the other hand, parents may have a hard time tolerating their children’s ways of grieving. “Sometimes parents have a hard time seeing their kids sad,” Casas says. “They may want to compensate by keeping them too busy or not letting them get too sad.”

Rather, she says, parents should seek to model that it’s OK to be sad but everyone grieves in their own way: “If you feel like crying one day and your siblings [don’t] that’s OK, you’re grieving as a family. You support each other but it’s not going to come out the same way at the same time for each family member.”

About the Children’s Grief Center

• Most clients seek out the clinic’s services to address issues of death and divorce, but therapists also address abandonment, incarceration and other issues. About 75 percent are between 1 and 18 years old. About a third are of color, a third white, and a third did not provide information on their ethnicity. More than 60 percent are women and girls.
• Therapists see patients in the Chicago Loop, Deerfield, Evanston, Evergreen Park, Hyde Park, and Oak Park. Therapists also work with children in Chicago and Evanston public schools.
• From July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017 therapists saw 375 patients 3,946 times, an average of 10 visits per patient.

If you have further questions about counseling for child and adolescent grief related to the loss of a loved one or interested in learning how to get treatment, please visit our Locations & Contact page.