Children view loss in a very different manner from our belief or interpretation of it. This article talks about how they cope with losing something special to them whether it's a pet or a family member. Encourage your children to discuss how they feel or what their opinion is about losing something or someone in their life. I believe that we as parents can learn a lot from them at times. Here are some tips for helping children cope with loss.
I have learned that children are remarkable and healers. Coping with lost or losing something really important can be difficult but what happens when children lose something how do they cope with lost. Recently I purchased a turtle for my sons.
They named the turtle Leonardo from the Ninja Turtles movie. One day the kids were playing around in the living and knocked down the shelf Leonardo fell very hard and my youngest end up squashing him . Leonardo died that day and we had a burial at sea, AKA the toilet.
The service was very short. The boys each said a couple of nice words about Leonardo and he was flushed into the great big blue. After the service was over, the kids went right back to playing around as if nothing really occurred. When I was ten my father had passed away and I knew that he was gone. At that time I believed I blocked it out and created something to give me comfort.
My comfort blanket for dealing with my father’s passing was to pretend he was a secret agent sent on an important mission. This mission he had was so dangerous that he had to leave his wife and family behind. In my head he left a note saying that he had to leave but he will return and we will be together again one day. I held onto that until I was teenager.
One unexpected day I looked up at the calendar and it was the anniversary of my father’s death. My mother, sister and I went to place flowers on his grave and on the road home from the cemetery my mother fell asleep. My sister and I began to talk.
I asked her if she remembered our father, as she was only six when he died. My sister said she did remember him, then she said, "When I was a little girl I pretended he was a secret agent that had to go away and in my dream he returned when I was this age now."
It was funny that she shared the same image of losing him the exact same way I did and the irony of it all is , we never told each other until that day at the cemetery.
Let your children talk about how they feel inside. Sometimes they help you heal along that path of loss.
Mom Topics 
Children view loss in a very different manner from our belief or interpretation of it. This article talks about how they cope with losing something special to them whether it's a pet or a family member. Encourage your children to discuss how they feel or what their opinion is about losing something or someone in their life. I believe that we as parents can learn a lot from them at times. Here are some tips for helping children cope with loss.
