Working With Kids And Teens Who Have Lost Someone
Earl Grollman spent most of his career at Harvard Medical School dealing with the practical problem of how grief affects people under eighteen. His book on the subject isn't exactly a step-by-step manual, but it does lay out what actually happens when a child loses a parent, sibling, or grandparent and how to respond without making things worse. The core idea is straightforward: kids grieve differently than adults, they often hide it, and treating them like miniature adults makes everything harder. I ran into this material years ago when I was supporting a school counselor dealing with a twelve-year-old who had lost his father to cancer. The kid was perfectly fine in class, A-student, on the soccer team. Then he started showing up early and staying late, sitting in the hall outside the counseling office without asking to go in. The obvious approach would have been to just sit him down and talk about feelings. That doesn't work. What worked was giving him something to do—puzzles, drawing, anything where the talking wasn't the main event. Grollman talks about this indirectly through his broader work: children process grief through activity, not through extended conversation. They'll open up when they're not being asked directly. The developmental piece matters more than most people realize. A five-year-old who loses a grandparent genuinely believes the dead person is just sleeping or will come back once they wake up. Telling that child "Grandma is dead" and expecting comprehension is useless. You have to be literal, concrete, and repeat yourself. Dead means dead. Buried means underground. They won't forget because you said it once. I had a case where a seven-year-old kept asking where her mom was after the funeral because she assumed the casket was just a box that would open later. Not dramatic, just developmental. Grollman's work addresses this but you have to apply it honestly rather than treating it as a checklist.
What Actually Helps
Grollman's framework centers on four things that most people get wrong in practice. First, honesty about what happened. Euphemisms like "passed away" or "lost" create confusion and suspicion in children who hear adults using them inconsistently. Second, allowing the child to participate in rituals if they want to. Forcing attendance at a funeral or wakes causes more harm than it prevents, but letting them choose matters. Third, maintaining routine as much as possible. Grief destabilizes a kid's sense of security, and keeping school, meals, and bedtimes consistent provides a frame that holds while everything else feels loose. Fourth, acknowledging your own grief in front of them. Kids notice when you're falling apart even if you think you're hiding it. It's better they see you cry than see you pretend you're fine. The counter-intuitive part that most guides miss: silence from a bereaved child is not recovery. I worked with a sixteen-year-old girl whose brother died in a car accident. For six months she was calm, almost eerily composed. Her teachers thought she was handling it beautifully. She wasn't. She'd just learned that expressing grief got uncomfortable reactions from everyone around her—awkward silences, changed subjects, people avoiding her. When she finally broke down it was over something trivial, a dropped lunch tray, and it took weeks to untangle that from the actual loss. Grollman warns about this but the warning gets lost if you're skimming. Complicated grief in adolescents often presents as irritability, withdrawal, or sudden academic decline rather than sadness. Misidentifying it as bad behavior leads to disciplinary action instead of support, which compounds the problem.
The Practical Application
If you're a parent, teacher, or counselor working with a grieving child or teen using Grollman's approach, here's what that looks like on a Tuesday afternoon. Start by asking what the child needs, not what you think they need. That sounds simple but it's where most interventions fail. An eight-year-old might need you to read a book with them and not talk about the death at all. A fourteen-year-old might need you to sit in the same room while they do homework and say nothing. Both are valid. Both are grief work. When the death involves suicide, violence, or a traumatic event, Grollman's guidance shifts slightly. The child needs age-appropriate facts without graphic detail, and they need to know they weren't responsible. I've seen adults omit crucial context because it felt too painful to discuss, and kids fill in the gaps with fantasy. Fantasy is almost always worse than reality for a child. A ten-year-old imagining their parent died because they were "bad" is a heavy burden to carry silently. There are limitations to this approach that Grollman himself acknowledged but which get overlooked. The model assumes a relatively stable support system around the child. If the surviving parent is also drowning in grief and can't provide consistency, the framework strains. It also assumes the adult has some emotional capacity to be present. You can't pour from an empty cup, and well-meaning volunteers or overextended teachers sometimes try to be therapeutic figures when they're not equipped for it. In those cases, referral to a trained grief counselor is necessary, not optional.
For younger children, picture books and stories about death help more than you'd expect. Grollman references this but doesn't spend excessive time on it. The key is picking materials where the child can project their own experience onto characters without being lectured. For teens, the literature is thinner. They don't respond to children's books and most adult grief resources feel patronizing. Finding age-appropriate content is a genuine gap in the market that Grollman's work doesn't fully address. The takeaway is that Grollman's framework is less about techniques and more about attitude. Show up consistently. Don't pretend the death didn't happen. Let the child lead the conversation when they're ready. And recognize that grief isn't a problem to solve, it's a process to accompany. The kids who do well aren't the ones who were talked through their feelings. They're the ones who weren't left alone with it.
Get the Full Details
