Helping Children Cope with Loss and Change

A Guide for Professionals and Parents

Amanda Seyderhelm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000043976
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Psychology

Whether it's the grief of bereavement, the strain of divorce or the uncertainty of a new home or school, loss and change affect children in countless ways. Nevertheless, teachers and parents frequently find themselves ill-equipped to help children struggling with the difficult feelings that these situations, and others like them, bring. Helping Children Cope with Loss and Change offers guided support for teachers, health professionals and parents.

Designed for use with children aged 4-10, this guide offers:

• Case studies illustrating various signs of grief and loss, to help the caregiver spot and manage a child's pain.
• Therapeutic stories designed to be read with the child, and with prompt questions to encourage discussion.
• Creative activities and exercises that can be developed into a therapeutic 'toolkit' to support the child and the caregiver themselves.

With chapters that move from Loss and Change to Resolution and Resilience, addressing the needs of both the child and caregiver, Helping Children Cope with Loss and Change will be an invaluable therapeutic tool.

Chapter 1

Loss

We are powerless to control the losses and catastrophic events our children need to experience, but by honouring their inner wisdom, providing mentors, and creating safe spaces for expression, we can empower them to become more capable, more caring, human beings.

Linda Goldman, Children Also Grieve, 2005

Background and rationale

Research figures published by Child Bereavement UK (online) show that:

● 92% of children and young people will experience a ‘significant’ bereavement before the age of 16;

● up to 70% of schools have a bereaved pupil on their roll;

● 1 in 29 school-age children will have been bereaved of a parent or sibling.

● 1 in 16 has been bereaved of a close friend.

That is one bereaved child in every classroom!

Context

Childhood Bereavement UK states that bereaved children report experiences of being bullied as a result of their bereavement and can also experience difficulties with concentration and a lack of interest in school. Bereavement can also interrupt a pupil’s school attendance and may also be a factor in behaviour in school.

What can schools do?

The purpose of this book is to give school staff a toolkit so that they feel more confident and equipped to identify and help a child who is going through a bereavement, loss or change.

How children and young people grieve

The way children grieve will to some extent be determined by their attachment style. Research completed by Dr Colin Murray Parkes shows us that the attachment style and vulnerability that is evident in childhood continues into adult life and may have an impact on the way individuals react to losses such as bereavements in adult life. How our attachments develop in childhood can influence how far we can trust ourselves and others in our life. Crucially our attachment style may affect our ability to form coping strategies when an important close relationship is lost.

Dr Parkes studied a sample of 278 individuals referred to him by a general physician, often with loss related problems. His work discusses attachment styles and describes them as being:

Secure: Those whose parents provided security grow up trusting themselves and others, which enables them to be able to tolerate separations without suffering high anxiety. Although they may struggle with unexpected losses, they may cope well with the changes the losses bring and use them to discover new meaning.

Anxious/Ambivalent: Those whose parents were anxious, overprotective and/or insensitive to meeting their child’s need for independence, tend to grow up being anxious, with low self-confidence and with a tendency to cling to their parents. They tend to struggle with separating from their parents and their relationships in adult life may contain a lot of conflict. After a bereavement their anxiety dominates their behaviour and they may cling to those trying to support them. Children with this attachment style may show a tendency to form dependent relationships which teachers need to be aware of.

Avoidant: Those whose parents were intolerant of intimacy and expressing emotion learn to be inhibited from emotional displays and to be independent from an early age. They may become intolerant of intimacy which can complicate their adult relationships. Following bereavement, they tend to be inhibited in their grief which may then show up in distorted ways. They are often hard on themselves for their inability to express their feelings, and may respond positively to a relationship which allows them to be expressive.

Disorganized: Those whose parents’ emotional needs made it impossible for them to respond consistently to their child’s needs may grow up feeling helpless about their own needs and distrusting themselves and others. Bereavement can panic them and also give them a chance to discover that not everyone will let them down.

Teachers can provide children with the secure base that makes them feel safe enough to face the struggles associated with loss and change that can make them feel very unsafe.

Grief work is a wholehearted challenge, affecting us physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. It is heroic work because it takes courage and tenacity to take the challenge on. I liken this work to heroic work, as in the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey is the common template that involves a hero who goes on an adventure, and faced with a crisis, finds the resources to win, and returns home changed or transformed. Rooted in narratology and comparative mythology, it was adapted by Joseph Campbell and other scholars to describe man’s universal spiritual quest for understanding themselves through story.

For grieving children in the 4–10 age group, who struggle to express their grief verbally, the hero’s is a framework in which can understand their

I believe the task of healing from bereavement is for children to find their voice, which may have been hidden underneath fear and confusion, and depending on the circumstances of their loss, shock. Finding their voice involves them making sense of their grief and loss, and the best way to do this is through metaphorical story, set within a hero’s journey framework.

In the traditional hero’s journey, the main character finds a mentor who advises him to discover his own resources. In my stories, this mentor character is often a parent, friend or teacher. In doing this I hope to encourage this audience to engage with the children in the storytelling. There are adult messages for them in the stories.

In my practice, I provide a space where the child’s narrative can be understood and heard through the power of play. Landreth (2002, p. 304) reminds us that toys are children’s words, and play is their language. Therefore a narrative approach to play therapy can be construed simply as play therapy itself wherein the therapist respects the forms of expression of those narratives which are available to the child through the Play Therapy toolkit. I agree with Cantor (2007, p. 12) that ‘narrative therapists seek to re-author the dominant problem-saturated stories in a client’s life’. The study of therapeutic storytelling illuminates that for many clinical approaches, both classic and modern, storytelling frequently involves the creation of a new story. It’s the new story that I am interested in helping bereaved children find. Bereaved children recreate their story, and the therapeutic stories in this book will give you the framework within which to explore the bereaved child’s grief.

How children understand death at different ages

Grief reactions may not be immediately obvious to teachers and caregivers. Children and young people may put up a good front pretending they are coping better than they actually are, in order to protect those around them. Their feelings may be bottled up and understanding this may happen is essential when supporting children. Making time and space for children to express these feelings is vital.

Children can sense loss from an early age. Their level of understanding develops alongside their cognitive development.

Infants (birth to 2 years)

A baby has no understanding of death or dying but will be aware of a separation from the person to whom they have an attachment. Their reaction to this separation could be expressed by increased crying, decreased responsiveness, erratic feeding and disrupted sleep patterns.

Preschool-age children (2–5 years)

Children believe that death is reversible and expect the deceased to return. This is the ‘magical thinking’ stage where the world is understood as a combination of reality and fantasy. At this stage children are naturally egocentric and may develop unexpressed guilt as a result of thinking that they caused the person to die and if they are ‘good enough’ the deceased person will return to them. Children struggle to grasp abstact concepts like death, which is why it’s important to speak clearly about death so that these fantasies of the dead person coming back to life are not indulged. To try and make sense of events children may often repeat the same questions. We often see children at this stage worrying about who will take care of them and about being abandoned. They will struggle to put their feelings into words and instead react to loss by acting out through behaviours like irritability, aggression, physical symptoms, sleep difficulties, or regression (bed-wetting or thumb-sucking, babyish language and temper tantrums). They could also make over-anxious attachments to familiar adults to try and ease their loss.

Primary school-age children (6–12 years)

Children start to understand the permanence and irreversibility of death and something that is part of the natural cycle of life. In spite of this they may still at times use ‘magical thinking’ and see death as a bit ‘spooky’ which may lead them to develop a curiosity in the more morbid aspects of death, such as what happens to the body and how it decomposes. They may think of the dead person as a spirit, a ghost, an angel or a skeleton. They do start to become less egocentric and more aware of the feelings of those around them. Physically they may complain of headaches, tummy aches, which are physical manifestations of their emotional pain that they cannot yet fully verbally articulate. They may experience a range of emotions including guilt, anger, shame, anxiety, sadness and worry about their own mortality. They may experience difficulty expressing these feelings verbally and they may act them out behaviourally as school phobia, poor school performance, aggression and withdrawal from their friends.

Grief processes

Grief is a reaction to any form of loss.

Bereavement is the process of recovering from the death of a loved one. Both encompass a range of feelings from sadness to anger, and the process of adapting to a significant loss varies from one person to another, depending on his or her background, beliefs, relationship to what was lost, and other factors.

Childhood bereavement differs from adult bereavement because young children do not have the cognitive development and language to express their grief verbally. Therefore, engaging them through therapeutic story gives them a safe distance to explore their feelings through metaphor.

Models of grief

Freud (1917) originated the notion of, ‘grief work’, the idea that we must work through grief to overcome it. Bowlby (1980) incorporated this idea into his attachment theory, for the purpose of ‘rearranging representations of the lost person, and relatedly, of the self’ (Stroebe and Schut, 1999). This enabled the breaking of affectional bonds (Bowlby, 1969), and the relocation of the deceased so that adjustment could be made to the physical absence of this person in life. This model has been criticized by other theorists, particularly Worden (1991) who reformulated the grief process in terms of distinct tasks. In all of this, it is important to note that we must not simply extend the adult models, stages and tasks of grief to children, because we know that young children have not developed cognitively to the point where they can verbally express their feelings in a similar way to adults. This is why the framework of therapeutic storytelling allows bereaved children to develop their own understanding of their grief, in their own language of play and story-making.

My approach to working with grief aligns closely with Neimeyer’s reconstruction in the wake of loss, in which ‘a central process in grieving is the attempt to reaffirm or reconstruct a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss’ (Neimeyer, 2001). Working with bereaved children, we do this by learning to explore a narrative within the context of metaphor and therapeutic story, to help the children find their own meaning; this enables children to build a safe internal modelling of the deceased, while also exploring ways to rebuild their life after loss. This helps them to feel more secure both internally and externally, as they go about their daily lives.

This approach also makes room for a more culturally diverse range of grieving. Different conceptualizations of what is acceptable or ‘healthy’ ways of coping with loss are to be found in non-Western cultures (Stroebe & Schut, 1999; Stroebe & Stroebe, 1987). For example in some Aboriginal tribal peoples, mutilating the body, or tearing of the hair is considered to be a normal of (Stroebe & Stroebe, 1987).

Some c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Loss
• 2 Change
• 3 Resolution
• 4 Resilience
• Final thoughts
• Appendices
• Resources
• Bibliography