Transcript - How Children Grieve — and How to Support Them With Dr. Korie Leigh

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: How Children Grieve — and How to Support Them With Dr. Korie Leigh

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for episode 570 of Live Happy Now. Managing grief as an adult is difficult, but what happens when you need to help a child navigate it? This week’s guest is here to answer that question. I’m your host, Paula Felps, and today, I’m joined by Dr. Korie Leigh, an internationally recognized expert in childhood bereavement and a best-selling author. Her newest book, When Everything Changes: Parenting Through Loss and Grief, was written to help families navigate grief with honesty, clarity, and compassion. Today, she sits down to talk about how children handle grief differently and what adults need to know to help them on that journey. Let’s have a listen.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:46] PF: Dr. Korie, thank you so much for being with me today.

[0:00:49] KL: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

[0:00:51] PF: Oh, well, this is a fantastic time to talk to you. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so it’s a great time to talk about the role that grief plays in mental health. Obviously, we’re going to dig into that. But I wanted to find out, first of all, why it was such an area of interest for you to study.

[0:01:07] KL: I started out in my profession as a child life specialist. A lot of people haven’t heard of this career before. Listeners that are like, “A child life what?”

[0:01:18] PF: They’re googling it right now.

[0:01:19] KL: Yeah. They’re like, “Wait. What is she saying? The life of a child?” Typically, child life specialists work in pediatric hospitals. We are trained at the intersection of typical childhood growth and development and the impact that stress, hospitalization, trauma, and illness has on that child’s development. In a hospital setting, you’ll find us oftentimes preparing children for medical procedures, helping them cope through that medical procedure, teaching them about a new diagnosis, helping the siblings understand what’s happening. Of course, in any kind of pediatric setting, you’ll have children who are quite critically ill.

Even though the intention I had starting out in this field wasn’t necessarily to work in end-of-life care, that is inevitably where I ended up, because I was working with incredibly critically ill kids who were dying, working with their families. I didn’t feel as equipped as I wanted to. That’s when I went back and I found the field of thanatology, which is another word I’m sure your listeners are like, “A thana what?”

[0:02:30] PF: I’m glad you brought that up, because I was afraid I was going to butcher it when I pronounced it. Thank you.

[0:02:35] KL: Yeah, no worries. Thanatology, the Greek root Thanos, and then ology. Thanos was the god of death. When you put those two words together, you get the study of death, dying, grief, and loss. That was my first masters, was in public health and thanatology, that pivoted my career. I left the hospital setting and I focused in the pediatric, palliative, and hospice care.

[0:03:03] PF: You had already written two books, and now you have a new book called When Everything Changes: Parenting Through Loss and Grief. That is written specifically for families that are navigating grief. Can you talk about how it expands upon the two books that you had previously written?

[0:03:18] KL: Yeah. The first book that I wrote, it really came out of a frustration, a lack of developmentally appropriate literature for young kids. We had a fair amount of books on death, what death is, how to talk to kids about death. At the time that I wrote my first book, we really didn’t have any books that addressed, okay, what happens after the person that you love has died? What are all these feelings that you have? What are these experiences that you’re having? What is it called? That’s how I wrote my first book, and it’s for younger kids, and it really talks about what grief is, why we feel it, how we feel it, and what to do with it.

That led to my second book, which is a book for teenagers, which is a psychotherapeutic book, and it gives bite-sized information about grief, dispels some myths about grief. For instance, that grief is not just the emotional response we have to loss. It’s also in the body. We also have biological changes that happen. Our brains are impacted. I provide a little bit of information, and then I offer opportunities to explore either through writing prompts, or activities, or social interaction ideas. My third book was, it really, also, it came out of those first two books, and so far that’s like, okay, I have a book for young kids, I have a book for teens. What about the adults in these young people’s lives, and also recognizing that grief and the experience of grief isn’t just from the death of a person. We can experience grief due to a lot of different loss experiences.

This current book that just came out addresses death, but it also addresses things like divorce, incarceration, climate disasters, hospitalization, the diagnosis of a chronic illness, and it looks at loss as much more than the death of a person.

[0:05:23] PF: I was so glad to see that, because I think sometimes we’ve seen literature where it deals with children and grief, and it’s about death. Whether that’s the death of a pet, or the death of a parent. It’s the loss of somebody close to them. Then we try to fit that into a different situation. Like, how do I make this fit a divorced situation? Or I remember being a small child and my oldest sister went off to college, and I was incredibly close to her, and people did not recognize that as grief, and I didn’t until I became an adult. But it was so painful for me, and there were no words for it, and there was no way to really talk about it. That is one thing that I so appreciated about your book, is that you recognize grief comes in so many different forms.

[0:06:13] KL: Absolutely. That was a really important aspect of the book, is to also help provide language to these different loss experiences, aspects like ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, styles of grieving. These are all concepts that I think people inherently know exist, but they don’t necessarily have the term for it, or have it described to them in a way that just takes all of the academic jargon out of the mix, and it just explains it in a very matter-of-fact way.

[0:06:46] PF: Yeah, it’s not as sterile as some books on grief can be when it’s explaining that, and that’s absolutely appreciated. Who did you have in mind as you were writing this?

[0:06:57] KL: I think, primarily, it was adults in a child’s life. So, primary caregivers, and that could definitely be parents, but it could also be foster parents. It could be the aunties and the uncles that are raising a whole new generation of young ones. It could be grandparents. It could be a teacher. It could be someone that runs an after-school program. The perspective that I had is if you intersect with children in any way in your life, this is a book for you. Because the fact of the matter is that grieving children, this isn’t a small population. There are millions of grieving children. This is a pervasive challenge amongst communities. A part of the work that I do, not just with the books that I do, but in my advocacy and in my education, is to help increase what I call grief literacy. That is just the understanding that grief exists in our communities, and here’s how it shows up. As a byproduct of that, we can become a grief-informed community, and that recognizes the way that grief shows up. As community members, we don’t have to hold any fancy credentials, we can be a support to the people in our communities that are grieving.

[0:08:13] PF: That’s wonderful. You’re part of a movement that can truly change the way that we approach this. What happens when parents are also grieving, and they’re trying to work with a child? You’re trying to manage your child’s grief, but at the same time, you’re managing your own grief. How do they go about that?

[0:08:32] KL: Yeah. That was a secondary. If there were two primary purposes of my book, this is a secondary purpose. It’s to recognize that as a parent who is grieving and also parenting a grieving child, you have a double duty, that in a lot of respects is an impossible task. There is no way that you can be fully present for yourself and your grief, and fully present for your child, or children and theirs.

How I wrote the book is in the first part of the book, I provide a lot of context, a lot of foundational information. Every chapter, or every part focuses on the parent first. Helps to provide them with strategies and tools to even understand just how this loss is impacting them, understanding what their emotional and physical response is, and then working from that place of recognizing that parenting at its best is about being good enough. That is a term from Winnicott, right? The good enough parents.

[0:09:37] PF: Right.

[0:09:38] KL: There is no perfect. Good enough means that you’re meeting the needs most of the time. Even when you don’t meet them, it isn’t in the rupture. It isn’t tend on how you’re not meeting. It’s in the repair. It’s in the coming back to the moments where we had that conversation yesterday about daddy dying. I don’t think I explained things the way that I wanted to. Can we talk about that again? That’s the repair. That’s the coming back to and the revisiting these conversations.

At a bare minimum, the purpose of my book, of this particular book was to help provide framework and strategies, help to normalize the grief experience that parents are having and to help empower them to recognize like, “I can do this falling apart. I can do this crying. I can do this feeling numb. Even though I’m having those experiences, I can still support my child through their grief.”

[0:10:38] PF: Yeah. it does. It’s so very thorough. It’s a big book with so much information on it.

[0:10:45] KL: It is. It’s a little dense. There’s a lot in there.

[0:10:49] PF: The great thing is, as I was going through it, being able to pick and choose what suits you. It’s like this encyclopedia. You’re not going to sit down and read the whole thing cover to cover, but you will find, this is exactly the information that I need. I thought, what an incredible tool, because wherever someone’s at in their grief journey, or whatever their role is with that child, it’s an incredible resource for them. It’s very well done.

[0:11:16] KL: The way that you’re describing is exactly how I wanted it to be. I originally had pitched the book as a field guide. It is a parenting field guide.

[0:11:25] PF: I like that.

[0:11:26] KL: You certainly can read it cover to cover, but it isn’t meant to be read like that. It’s meant to be read like, “Oh, my goodness. Grandpa’s going on hospice. How do I explain hospice?” Open up to the hospice section. Go to the glossary in the back of the book where there’s developmentally appropriate definitions for these terms. Go to the part of the book where there’s a script, where there’s an example of having this conversation with a child and the questions that they will ask and possible answers to those.

[0:11:58] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

[BREAK]

[0:12:06] PF: Now let’s hear more from Dr. Korie Leigh.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]

[0:12:11] PF: Another part that I was so fond of that I have to bring up is how you address not using euphemisms and gentling the blow of death. It is natural for parents to want to protect their children, and they might want to soften that and they’re afraid of telling their children about death, that they’re going to be traumatized. Explain to us why it’s important to be so straightforward and factual about addressing death.

[0:12:38] KL: Yeah. It is a very normal response to want to protect your kids, right? That’s what we all want to do. Also, we can’t protect them from everything, and we can’t stop the hurts of the world from entering your family. Developmentally speaking, right, for younger children, they are in a stage called pre-operational, which is just a fancy term that really talks about the magical thinking that kids between the ages of three and six, or seven, generally speaking, are engaging in. What that looks like is when you tell them something, they will oftentimes take it literally. Let’s say, for instance, you are talking about someone died, but saying that word makes you feel uncomfortable. And so, you choose a different word. They’ve passed away. For a six-year-old who has just maybe entered the school age years and their concept of pass is passing a test –

[0:13:43] PF: Oh, wow.

[0:13:43] KL: – that confuses them. Pass. What did she pass? Did she fail something? Or another euphemism is we’ve lost her. Well, how could you do that? Let’s go find her. Let’s look under the tables and in the backyard and get a search party together. How could you lose my sister? She’s just right here.

[0:14:03] PF: Then, doesn’t that also make them afraid that they’re going to get lost?

[0:14:07] KL: So, yes. These things compound, right? In the work that I do, I use this phrase of, if something is nameless and shapeless, it has power over you. But when you can name it and be the narrator of your experience, you take back that power. The same thing happens with children with their young minds. If they don’t have developmentally concrete information, they’re going to make up stories. They’re going to put these, and you can imagine a puzzle, they’re going to put these missing, these remaining puzzle pieces that don’t fit and they’re going to make them fit.

The story that they come up with will oftentimes be far more scary, far more riddled with misconceptions. Oftentimes, can lead to the development of new fears, anxieties, intense guilt that they somehow caused this death to happen. Or because they did something, or didn’t do something. This is, they’re being punished. I worked with a young child, she was around the age of eight, whose dad died. In her mind, she believed that because she didn’t take the trash out for the week before, that he died as punishment. This is a really normal response. This concept of punishment, or guilt is incredibly normal for young kids. It can become heightened, especially in instances where there isn’t direct concrete information.

In the book and also in my work with families, I use what I call a dosing method, which is you provide a little bit of information to make sure that the child understands what’s happening and then you stop and assess. “Daddy died. Do you know what it means to die?” Let them answer. Dispel misconceptions and myths. Everything living dies. A lot of the times when people die, they die when they’re older, but sometimes they die by accidents. Then you provide the specific concrete information, right? What does that mean to die? Well, the organs inside of your body that keep you alive stop working. Your heart doesn’t beat. You don’t breathe. You don’t eat. You don’t sleep and you don’t play. Dead means dead forever. Then you pause.

Oftentimes, kids will tell you with their behavior. If their attention has already turned around, or in the case of a four-year-old where we had this conversation and we explained that her brother died and she looked at us, me and the mom and went, “Okay, I understand. Can we get ice cream?”

[0:17:01] PF: Oh, wow.

[0:17:02] KL: That was enough information for her. Sometimes that response can scare parents, or it can make them be like, “Oh, my God. Is my child sociopathic? She shows no emotions.” Kids grieve really differently than adults. You’re not going to see them crying and having the same response that adults do. They process information in a very, very different way than we do. If you think about our capacity for processing as a cup, right? Adults have a really big cup. We’ve got a 24-ounce yeti. We’ve got a really big –

[0:17:36] PF: Super Gulp.

[0:17:37] KL: Right? Kids have an 8 ounce little shot glass, or 6 ounce. A little bit of information is going to satiate them. They’re going to be done with it. Then they’re going to have to metabolize that. How they metabolize information is through play. It is incredibly normal and we want to see after a conversation like this for kids to be like, “Okay. Can I go play Mario Kart, or can I go outside with my friends?” That’s how they’re going to process and make sense of the information that you just gave them. After this short conversation, right, which usually is two sentences, three sentences, they’ll come back to you and they will let you know when they’re ready to ask more questions, or if they will bring it up.

[0:18:24] PF: That is so interesting. I had a friend who’s a therapist and she talked about having a client who had a little boy and the father died. They had the dad’s service and after the service, everyone was back at the house and the little boy just wanted to go ride his bike. He went and he would ride his bike around for a little bit and then he’d come and he’d sit on the porch and he’d cry. Then you’d get back on his bike and want to ride his bike again. She would talk about that as basically as a practice we can use as adults. Bike a little, cry a little and just keep processing it. That just really reinforces exactly what you’re talking about, like how they process it so differently.

[0:19:02] KL: Yeah. That is such a beautiful example, too. It’s also an example of what we call puddle jumping. Sometimes in the grief world, we call children puddle jumpers, because they will jump into their grief just as quickly jump out of it. They’ll feel their feelings and then they’ll go play. They’ll ask a really intense, very deep question as you’re trying to get them out the door for school, or in the supermarket and then they won’t bring it up for another week or two.

[0:19:33] PF: So then, how are parents to handle that at the same time they’re managing their grief? What’s that balance of walking hand in hand through this process? Because they’re doing it together, but very differently.

[0:19:46] KL: Yeah. I say too, a lot of times families are grieving together apart. You are all grieving the same loss, but you are experiencing that grief very differently, incredibly differently, especially if you have children in the home that are different developmental ages, that have temperaments that are different, that process stress differently. If you are in a partnership, oftentimes we have different grieving styles. The way that you’re grieving might be completely opposite from the way your partner’s grieving. In your mind, you’re like, “Oh, they’re not grieving the right way.” In their mind, “They’re grieving too much.” Then it becomes challenging. I mean, the whole thing is challenging.

What I say to parents is I remind them of the good enough concept. You’re meeting your kids needs most of the time in whatever way that you can. When those questions come up, it’s okay to say, “Oh, wow. That’s a really good question. I don’t know. What do you think?” Or, if you don’t want to put it back on the child, “That’s a really good question. Let’s think about this together.”

[0:21:02] PF: Oh, I like that.

[0:21:04] KL: Right? Because they’re going to ask questions that you legitimately do not have the answer to, or they might ask you a question that you don’t feel entirely prepared to answer in that moment. It’s okay to acknowledge the question, validate where it comes from, and say, “I don’t know.” But that’s one of the hardest things about parenting through losses. Your children are going to bring up the question over and over and over and you’re going to have to explain and re-explain over and over and over. It’s exhausting.

For most families, what I recommend is having other support people. Most states in America have a grief center for children. That is always a really wonderful way to get support for yourself as a parent and also have your child be surrounded with other grieving kids, so that they don’t feel like the only person who’s had a sister die.

[0:22:04] PF: Let me ask you about that. That seems like something that would be really important, because when you do lose someone as a child, you do feel very isolated and alone in that journey. How important is that to make sure that your child does have support of other people who’ve also experienced a similar loss?

[0:22:22] KL: Yeah. On the one hand, I think it’s incredibly supportive. On the other hand, I think it also depends on your child, on your child’s temperament, on your child’s willingness, or desire to be with other grieving kids. It isn’t necessarily being in the same space as grieving people. It’s that people try to compare, or they try to say, “Well, since you’ve had a mom die and I’ve had a dad die, I know what that’s like,” and they don’t. Even if it’s your mom died and this other kids mom died, again, it’s the same idea of grieving together apart. They have shared the same type of grief loss, but they don’t grieve the same way. That relationship wasn’t the same. For some kids, it’s not super helpful.

I always put it back on the parent to be like, “You know your child the best. Have a conversation with them. Talk to them about what this grief group will be like. Give it a try. Go for one session. See if they like it. Then no pressure if they don’t to keep going back.”

[0:23:33] PF: I love that. That is a great insight. How will learning to manage grief as a child inform the way that they move through life and how they handle loss later?

[0:23:44] KL: Yeah. It’s a really good question. Arguably, it is, yeah, the most powerful teaching moment in a child’s life to help build the muscle of resilience. I talk about this in the book and I talk about this in my advocacy work and in my teaching. There is a misconception that kids, that children are just naturally resilient. They’ll bounce back. They won’t remember this. They’re getting good grades. They seem to be doing well. Resilience is a muscle that we are all born with. But we have to practice using that muscle to build it. Oftentimes, kids, they have to be scaffolded. They have to be taught how to use the muscle.

Loss experiences, and I use loss in that generalized term, moving, divorce, having a sibling go away to college when you’re younger, pet loss, death, those are all moments that you can help your child build resilience, understand the way that loss and grief impact them, and then build tools for how to get through these hard moments. Because to go back to that earlier conversation, we can’t protect our kids from the hurts of the world. They’re going to happen. Would you rather have your child be sent out in the world with no tools, no guidebook, no way to know what to do when those hurts show up? Or, would you rather have them with a field guide, with some strategies, with a really, really strong sense of who they are in the face of adversity? I talk about those two different paths.

For the child that experiences a death that doesn’t have that death acknowledged, validated, isn’t provided with adequate coping skills. They are much more likely, and there’s a lot of research to back this up, much more likely to experience challenges with anxiety, depression, substance use, and much more likely to not have those coping techniques, so that when the next thing happens in their life, that muscle of resilience hasn’t been practiced.

[0:26:17] PF: Right. I just see this book as a valuable tool for parents, because the child will experience some sort of loss. There’s so much insight into parenting that you offer with this book.

[0:29:36] PF: Your books are feeling such a need that just hasn’t been properly filled. I won’t say it’s been overlooked, but there’s a lot of areas where you’re filling in the gaps, I would say –

[0:29:50] KL: Exactly. Yeah.

[0:29:51] PF: – between what’s already out there. I think you’re doing such a fantastic job with this. We’re going to give our listeners a link with a free download of the Family Resilience Conversation Cards that helps them build connections during hard times. We’re going to tell them how to find you, how to find your books. As we let you go, what is it that you really hope that our listeners take away from this conversation today?

[0:30:14] KL: That resilience is a muscle and you can build that together with your children. I will also say that, overwhelmingly, the parents that I work with, the conversations we have, they will let me know when I was a child and my grandma died, or when my dad died, I didn’t have any of this. A lot of the times when there is a current loss, it will propel you to prior losses. You will, what we call a regrieve. Even though my books are written for younger kids and teenagers and parents, you can use them at any age to help you process and regrieve those losses that you either didn’t feel safe enough to process, that you didn’t have the tools, or the strategies back then, it is never too late.

[0:31:11] PF: That’s so great. Thank you so much for the work you’re doing and the way that you’re putting it out there and changing the way we look at grief and I’m really excited for our listeners to get to know you.

[0:31:20] KL: Thank you so much for having me and for having these conversations with your listeners. I know that people really, really want spaces to have these conversations, so I appreciate what you’re doing.

[0:31:31] PF: Absolutely. Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:31:36] PF: That was Dr. Korie Leigh, talking about how to help children navigate grief. If you’d like to learn more about Korie, check out her books, follow her on social media, or download her free Family Resilience Conversation Cards, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode.

That is all we have time for today, we’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.

[END]

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why euphemisms around death can confuse children and increase fear or guilt.
How children “puddle jump” through grief and why their processing looks so different from adults.
How parents can support a grieving child even while grieving themselves — and why “good enough” parenting truly is enough.

Visit Dr. Korie’s website.

Discover her latest book, When Everything Changes: Parenting Through Loss and Grief.

Get a free download of Family Resilience Conversation Cards.

Follow Dr. Korie on social media:

TikTok: @drkorieleigh
Instagram: @drkorieleigh
LinkedIn: @korie-leigh-phd

Don’t Miss a Minute of Happiness!

If you’re not subscribed to the weekly Live Happy newsletter, you’re missing out! Sign up to discover new articles and research on happiness, the latest podcast, special offers from sponsors, and even a happy song of the week. Subscribe for free today!

Interested in advertising or partnering with us? Complete this quick form.