Helping children to grieve

The aim of this article is to address the needs of grieving children, who are often excluded from the grieving process. Many adults erroneously believe that children do not grieve or that their grief is milder and of a shorter duration than that of adults. The first section of the article examines the literature dealing with the problems of grieving children. Loss of someone close to a child can cause great distress and may have an adverse effect on development. Repression or denial of grief in childhood may lead to psychiatric illness in adulthood. It is therefore vitally important that adults understand children's grief and have some idea of how they can help them through the grieving process. The second part of the article draws on the published literature to present a number of strategies which may be of benefit in helping children through the grieving process.