Bethany sat on the floor of her daughter's bedroom, holding a stuffed rabbit Olivia had named Nutmeg. The rabbit still smelled like her daughter. It was the only thing left in the room that still did. Mark had died ten weeks earlier — a heart attack at forty-one, in the driveway, while carrying in groceries. Olivia had been seven years old then. She was still seven now. Nothing about that had changed. Everything else had.
Olivia walked in barefoot, carrying a sippy cup of water she did not need anymore because she was seven, but she kept drinking from it anyway. She crawled into Bethany's lap. She was quiet for a while. Then she asked a question that had been building somewhere behind her eyes for weeks.
"Mom, when Daddy died, did his soul come out of his body?"
Bethany felt the air leave the room. She was not ready for this. She was still working on whether her own soul had come out of her own body since Mark died. She did not know where her daughter had heard the word soul. Maybe Sunday school. Maybe Grandma. Maybe a book.
"Yes, honey," Bethany said, too fast. "His soul went to heaven. With Jesus."
Olivia considered this. Then she said, "But where was his soul when he was in the casket at the funeral? Was it there too? Or was it already up there?"
Bethany tried. She said something about how his soul had already gone. About how the part in the casket was just his body. About how he was with Jesus right now, and Jesus was taking care of him.
Olivia did not look satisfied. She slid off her mother's lap, said, "Okay," and walked out with her sippy cup.
Bethany sat there for a long time, holding Nutmeg.
That night, after she finally got Olivia to bed, Bethany called her pastor. She cried for ten minutes before she could say anything. Then she said, "I don't know what to tell her. I don't know what's true. I don't know what she needs. I don't know how to be her mom right now and be a widow and be a Christian and not be a liar. She's asking me questions I cannot answer, and I am all she has left."
The pastor listened. After a long pause he said, "Bethany, your daughter is a little theologian. She is not going to stop asking. And she is asking you because she trusts you. Let's figure out what to tell her."
This chapter is for parents like Bethany. It is for grandparents and aunts and uncles and Sunday school teachers and youth pastors and family friends who have ever had a child look up at them with a real question about death and not known what to say. And it is for the children themselves, through the adults who love them — because children grieve, too, and the grief of children is often the quietest and most easily missed grief in the whole church.
Chapter Thesis: Children and teens grieve, but they grieve differently from adults. They need specific care that honors their developmental stage, their own relationship with the person who died, and the distinct shape of childhood and adolescent sorrow. This chapter helps parents, pastors, and youth workers walk wisely with young grievers — including giving them honest information, receiving their questions, respecting their own mysterious experiences, and offering them the grounded hope Scripture and the careful research together provide.
The first thing to say is this: children grieve. They always have. They always will. When a person they love dies, children feel it — deeply, quietly, strangely, constantly. The old idea that children are "too young to understand" and therefore "too young to be affected" is one of the most persistent and harmful myths in family life. It is not true. It has never been true.1
A newborn does not have the words death or funeral or gone. But a newborn knows when the person who usually holds her is not holding her. A toddler does not understand a casket, but a toddler notices the empty chair at breakfast. A five-year-old may ask where Grandpa is and then, eight minutes later, want a cookie and then, an hour later, ask the same question again. That is not lack of grief. That is grief in a five-year-old body.2
A teenager may say he is "fine" and slam the door. A twelve-year-old may stop laughing the way she used to laugh. A nine-year-old may suddenly start worrying that his mom will die too. All of this is grief. All of this is a child's heart trying to make sense of the fact that someone has been taken out of the world who is never, ever coming back.
Our first job, then, is to take children's grief seriously — more seriously than the surrounding adults, whose own grief is loud, will usually let us. The adults' grief is not bigger than the child's grief. It is just louder. The child's grief is often harder to hear precisely because it is so easy to miss.
In 1948, a Hungarian psychologist named Maria Nagy interviewed almost four hundred children in Budapest about their understanding of death. Her study, later reprinted and expanded many times, became the foundation of modern developmental thinking about how young minds grasp mortality.3 Later researchers — Alan Wolfelt, William Kroen, and the team at the Dougy Center — filled in, corrected, and deepened her findings.4 The picture that has emerged is simple, but it matters: children do not understand death the way adults do, and what they can understand changes in clear, age-linked ways. If we try to talk to children about death without knowing where they actually are, we will miss them.
Children at this age cannot form the concept of death. But they feel absence. The baby who was rocked every night by Grandpa knows something has changed when Grandpa is not there. A toddler may look for the missing person in places she used to find him. Some children this age regress — they stop sleeping through the night, they cling more, they return to behaviors they had moved past. These are grief responses in the language a one-year-old has.
What they need is the steady presence of the adults who are still here. They need routine. They need hugs. They need to be told, in words they do not yet fully understand: "Grandpa died. We are sad. Mommy is still here. Daddy is still here. You are safe."
Children in this range often believe death is temporary. They may ask, the day after the funeral, when Grandma is coming back. They may expect her for Christmas. They may ask whether she will visit on her birthday. This is not denial in the adult sense. It is the shape of their mind. The permanence of death is a concept they are still developing.
Preschoolers think in magical ways. They believe their thoughts and words can make things happen. A four-year-old who was angry at his brother yesterday may worry — quietly, without telling anyone — that his anger caused the accident today. This kind of guilt is not rational, but it is real, and it can lodge in a small heart for a long time if no one names it and takes it away.5
Children this age ask concrete questions. Where is Grandma's body? Can she see me? Does she get hungry in heaven? Can she still hear me when I talk to her? These are real questions, not cute ones. Answer them as honestly as you can.
Somewhere between six and nine, most children begin to grasp that death is permanent and that it happens to every living thing. This is a significant, sometimes scary, step. Children of this age may begin to worry, for the first time, that their parents will die — or that they themselves will die. That worry is not a disorder. It is a developmental achievement. The price of understanding death is fearing it.
These children tend to hide their grief. They do not want to upset Mom. They do not want to look weak at school. They may cry in their beds and be chipper at breakfast. The grief is there. You just may not see it.6
Abstract thinking comes online in this range. Children can grasp spiritual concepts — heaven, soul, eternity, resurrection — in ways they could not at five. They can ask theological questions and want real answers. They can wonder, for example, whether their grandfather who was a kind but unbelieving man is with Jesus now. These are not questions to brush off. They are the questions of a child becoming a thinker.
Teenagers can think about death with adult cognitive capacity, but they do not yet have adult life experience or emotional regulation. This is a hard combination. Teens may grieve with the weight of a full-grown person and the coping tools of a child. Their grief often comes out as anger, withdrawal, risk-taking, or a sudden drop in school performance. Parents sometimes ask the pastor, "Is this grief, or is this just being a teenager?" The honest answer is: usually, some of both.7
Teens are also asking the real questions. Why did God let this happen? Is any of it true? What is the point of anything? These are good, important, grown-up questions. Do not rush the answers. Make room for doubt and honest wrestling. A teenager who is allowed to doubt out loud with a caring adult is far safer than one who has to doubt alone.
Before we talk about what to do, it is worth naming what we tend to do wrong. The common errors in caring for grieving children are so common that most of us will recognize ourselves in them. Naming them is not about shame. It is about not doing them again.
1. Shielding. We exclude children from funerals, conversations, and information, believing this will "protect" them. It usually does the opposite. Children know something huge has happened. When the adults go silent and do secret things behind closed doors, the child's imagination fills in the silence with worse. Including a child in the truth, at their level, is almost always less frightening than excluding them from it.
2. Silencing. We stop saying the dead person's name. We put the pictures away. We change the subject when the child brings them up. We think we are helping the child "move on." In fact, we are teaching the child that the person who died is now unspeakable — which is a heavier burden than the grief itself.
3. Rushing. We expect children to "bounce back" because, in a short-term way, they sometimes appear to. A child may cry hard at the funeral and then be riding bikes two hours later. We read this as the child being "okay." It is not. It is how children's grief works. The grief returns — often for years — at every new birthday, new school year, new understanding. Rushing is missing this longer rhythm.
4. Projecting. We assume the child feels what we feel. A widowed father, drowning in his own grief, may assume his nine-year-old son is drowning in the same way. Or he may assume that because the son is not obviously drowning, the son is "handling it fine." Both assumptions miss the child. A child's grief is the child's own — not a smaller version of the adult's.
5. Over-spiritualizing. We answer a five-year-old's question about where Grandma is with a seminary lecture on glorification, the intermediate state, and the ordo salutis. We mean well. We want to say the true thing. But we bury the truth under vocabulary the child cannot lift. What a five-year-old needs is true words she can carry — not true words that are too heavy for her hands.
Across the developmental literature and across the best Christian voices in children's grief, the list of things grieving children need is remarkably consistent. Here it is, in plain terms.8
Honest, age-appropriate information. Not everything. Not all at once. But honest. "Grandma died. Her body stopped working. She does not hurt anymore. She is with Jesus now." That is honest. That is age-appropriate. That is enough for today.
Permission to ask any question. The single most important sentence you can say to a grieving child is some version of this: "You can ask me anything. I will tell you what I know. And if I don't know, I will tell you that, too." Then keep that promise.
Participation. Children do better when they are allowed to participate — to place a flower in the casket, to draw a picture for Grandpa, to light a candle, to say one sentence at the service, to help choose the song. Participation turns a child from a bewildered spectator into a real mourner among mourners. That is where they belong.
Repetition. A child will ask the same question three times in three days. Each time, the question is new. Each time, the question is the beginning of a new layer of understanding. Answer the question again. And again. And again. Patience is its own gift here.
Physical affection. Extra hugs. Holding them longer at bedtime. Sitting on the floor with them. Their bodies are grieving with their minds, and their bodies need other bodies close.
Routine. Children are grounded by predictability. After a death, protect the daily rhythm as much as you can. Meals at normal times. Bedtime at normal times. School and sports as soon as it makes sense. Routine is not avoidance. It is safety.
Space to grieve in their own way. Some children grieve in tears. Some in art. Some in long silences. Some in a sudden obsession with the deceased's favorite song. Some in hard, busy play. Let your child grieve the way your child grieves. It is not your job to manage the form of their sorrow.
Words matter with children more than most adults realize. A careless euphemism from a grandparent can rattle around a child's mind for years. Here are some small, specific choices worth making.
Use the words "died" and "dead." They are plain, honest, and unambiguous. A child who hears, over and over, "Grandpa died," learns the shape of what has happened. A child who hears, over and over, "We lost Grandpa," may reasonably ask why no one is going to look for him.
Avoid "went to sleep." Well-meaning adults use this phrase to soften the blow. Children often hear it as a warning. If Grandpa "went to sleep" and did not wake up, then bedtime has just become a horror movie. Children have lost sleep for months over sentences that should have been left unspoken.9
Avoid "passed away" and "we lost him" for young children. These phrases assume the child has the abstract vocabulary to decode them. They often do not.
Be honest about what you do not know. "I don't know exactly what Grandma is doing right now. The Bible tells us she is with Jesus. I don't know all the details. But Jesus is holding her and Jesus is holding us." That is a better answer than a made-up one.
Address fears directly when they come up.
"Are you going to die too?" Yes, someday. But I am healthy, and I plan to be here for a very long time.
"Am I going to die?" Someday, like all people. But not today. And Jesus will be with you when you do.
"Was it my fault?" No. Never. Nothing you did or thought or said caused this. I promise you. I promise you.
One of the first and hardest moments in a family's grief is the moment the children are told. Parents often dread this conversation for hours or days, rehearsing sentences, trying not to cry, trying to get the words right. A few simple practices will serve you well.
Tell them as soon as you can. The longer you wait, the more likely the child is to hear it from someone else — a classmate, an overheard phone call, a cousin, the Internet. Children should hear the hardest news of their lives from the adults who love them most, not from Facebook.
Tell them in a familiar, safe place — your home, your couch, their bedroom. Not in a car. Not in a restaurant. Not on the way to school. A child needs to be able to collapse, if they need to, in a place where collapsing is safe.
Use short, clear words. "I have some very sad news. Grandma died today. Her heart stopped working, and the doctors could not fix it. She was not in pain. She is with Jesus now. And we are going to miss her very much." That is enough for the first minute. Then stop. Wait. See what they ask.
Expect almost any reaction — or no reaction at all. Some children cry immediately. Some go silent. Some ask to watch cartoons. Some ask what's for dinner. Some get angry. None of these responses is "wrong." They are all the shape of a young mind trying to absorb something enormous. Do not correct the reaction. Just stay close.
Tell each child separately if the ages are very different, or all together if they are close in age — whichever feels more natural to your family. In either case, plan to circle back with each child individually over the next few days. The second and third conversations will matter as much as the first.
If the death was a suicide, an overdose, or a violent death, the details can wait. Tell the child only what they need to know at their level. A young child does not need the mechanism. An older child or teenager can be told, gently, that the death was not a natural illness — but even here, honor the child's pace. Chapter 15 addresses suicide loss more fully. The core rule for young children is: no graphic details, no images, no speculation about method. What they need to know is that the person is dead and that it was not their fault.
End the first conversation, when you can, with a small, true comfort. "You are safe. I am still here. Jesus is still here. We will be sad for a long time, and we will also be okay. We will get through this together." Then give them permission to go play, or cry, or be quiet, or all three in the next hour.
One of the most common questions parents ask pastors in the first twenty-four hours after a death is whether to bring the children to the funeral. My usual answer — and the recommendation of nearly every serious specialist in children's grief — is yes, with preparation.10
A funeral is not an event children should be shielded from by default. A funeral is the community's first, clearest, most honoring act of saying goodbye. When children are excluded, they miss the gift their community is offering. They also miss the closure that the ritual provides. They are often left wondering what happened in that mysterious, closed-off event — and the wondering is worse than the ritual would have been.
Preparation is the key. Before the service, walk your child through what will happen. Tell them about the casket. Tell them if there will be an open viewing. Tell them there will be a lot of crying. Tell them that Mommy will cry too and that it is okay. Tell them what the pastor will do. Tell them where the cemetery is. Tell them they can hold your hand the whole time. Tell them they can leave the room if they need to. Have a designated adult — not the grieving parent — whose job it is, during the service, to keep an eye on the child and take them out if they need a break.
Some children want to see the body. Some do not. Honor either preference. Children who do want to see usually benefit from a short, supervised visit before the public service, where they can walk up with an adult, look for a minute, touch a hand if they wish, and leave. A child who touches a cold hand for the first time is not traumatized. A child often receives something real from the experience: the body is not the person. The person is gone. The body remains.
Let children participate in small ways if they want to. Placing a flower. Dropping a handful of dirt at the graveside. Drawing a picture to put in the casket. Reading one sentence. Lighting a candle. These small acts stay with a child for the rest of their lives, in good ways. The child who placed a daisy on Grandma's casket at age six does not remember being sad, exactly. She remembers that she was there, that she did something, that she belonged.
Adults often worry about children who seem to grieve for ten minutes and then run off to play. This is not denial. It is not callousness. It is the shape of children's grief.11
William Worden, whose Harvard Child Bereavement Study followed bereaved children for years, described children as grieving in "puddles" — short, intense immersions in sorrow, separated by long stretches of ordinary life. Adults tend to grieve in oceans: a continuous, heavy sea of loss over long months. Children step into puddles, get drenched, step out, dry off, play, and step back in an hour later. Both are grief. Children's grief is not smaller because it is shorter. It is simply shaped differently.
Play is not avoidance of grief for a child. Play is how children process grief. A child who is playing house with her dolls, two weeks after her father's death, and whose "dad doll" keeps going on long trips and not coming back, is working out her father's death with every plastic step. Resist the urge to interrupt her play with more serious conversation. The play is the conversation. She will come to you when she needs words.
Expect the puddles to show up at the developmental transitions no one sees coming. The first day of kindergarten without Mom. The school project where every other kid talks about their dad. The twelfth birthday. The first time they beat Grandpa's old fishing record. The graduation. The wedding. The birth of their own child. Every one of these is a new chamber in the heart, and the grief walks into each of them for the first time.
Here is where the pastoral care gets particular for Christian children. What do we actually say? What, in specific language a seven-year-old can carry, is the real hope?
Start with the soul. A child can understand, on the first try, that there are two parts to a person: the body we can see, and the real inside you that we cannot. Call it the soul. Call it the spirit. Call it the person. The word does not matter as much as the idea: you are not just your body. The most important part of you is invisible. And when your body dies, the most important part of you does not die — it keeps going.
This is the doctrine the whole book has been resting on. It is called substance dualism in the scholarly books.12 It is the old, plain teaching of Scripture that a human being is a body and a soul, and the soul survives when the body fails (see Chapter 3 for the fuller account). To a seven-year-old, you do not say "substance dualism." You say: "Daddy's body stopped working. But the part of Daddy that was really Daddy — his soul — didn't stop. His soul is with Jesus now. Jesus is taking care of him. And someday, when Jesus makes everything new, Daddy is going to get a new body. Not sick. Not hurt. New. And we will all be together."
That is six sentences. Each one is true. Each one is simple. Each one can be carried by a seven-year-old heart without crushing it.
Jesus and the Children. "Let the little children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them (Mark 10:14–16, ESV).
Of all the scenes in the Gospels, this one should shape how we speak to grieving children. Jesus did not brush them off to the adults. He did not tell them to be quiet and wait. He drew them close, put his hands on them, and blessed them. This is the Jesus your child is meeting in their grief. This is the Jesus who has their loved one right now.
You can say, too — and should — that the Bible is not silent about children. David lost his infant son and, through his tears, said words every grieving parent and child should know: "I shall go to him, but he will not return to me" (2 Samuel 12:23). David is not guessing. He is confident. He will see his son again. That confidence is at the heart of Christian hope for anyone who has ever buried someone they love. Chapter 14 develops the full biblical picture of children who die. Here, the key point for your seven-year-old is the one David already had: I will go to him.
You can tell your child, too, that love does not stop. The death of a body does not end love. The grandfather who loved them on earth loves them now. That is not sentiment. That is what it means to say a person is with Christ in Paradise — the person still is, the person's love for us still is, and one day we will be with that person again in the new heavens and the new earth (see Chapters 2, 3, and 33).
"Grandpa still loves us. Love does not stop." Say it. Let your child hear it.
One of the most sensitive pieces of caring for grieving children is what to do when they report experiences of the one who died. Dreams so vivid they seem real. A sense of Grandpa standing in the bedroom. A feeling of Mom tucking them in. A "visit" from the deceased relative in a moment of distress.
Many parents panic when their child reports this. They worry it is imagination gone wrong. They worry it is something darker. They worry their child is "confused."
The research is strong and growing: children's experiences of a deceased loved one are common, generally comforting, and often indistinguishable in shape from the experiences of adults (see Chapters 22 and 23 for a full treatment of after-death communications and sensed presences).13 Parents of bereaved children report that their children, more than themselves, seem to have these experiences — and that the experiences often arrive at moments of specific need.14
The pastoral rule is simple. Receive the experience respectfully. Do not dismiss it. Do not pathologize it. Do not over-spiritualize it, either. Ask the child to tell you about it. Listen. Say, "That sounds very real. I am glad that happened to you." Help them remember the marks of discernment you would use for any experience — does it agree with Scripture, does it leave them at peace, does it draw them toward Jesus or away from him (see Chapter 25 for the fuller discernment framework). But do not squash the experience. A child's first instinct in these moments is usually healthy. The parent's first instinct is often to protect the child from their own interior life — which almost always does more harm than good.
The more striking evidence is what children have reported when they themselves have come close to death. The pediatrician Melvin Morse began his work on children's near-death experiences in 1982, when a seven-year-old named Katie was pulled unconscious from a swimming pool, resuscitated, and made a full recovery three days later. When she was able to talk, she told Morse that during her unconsciousness she had met Jesus, the heavenly Father, an apparent angel, and two boys named Mark and Andy. She also described, in detail, what her family had been doing in their house during her coma — including what her brothers had been playing with (a GI Joe in a jeep) and what her mother had been cooking. Her mother confirmed every detail.15
Katie's case launched Morse's long research program into children's NDEs at Seattle Children's Hospital. His conclusion, after years of studying children who had come close to death, was simple and striking. The best explanation of their experiences — the one that fit the data with the fewest contortions — was that these children had actually glimpsed a real spiritual world beyond death.16 He was not writing as a preacher. He was writing as a physician trying to find the simplest hypothesis that explained what he saw.
What makes children's experiences especially striking as evidence is that children have less rehearsed ideas about death. They have not watched documentaries on near-death experiences. They rarely know, going in, what they "should" see. And yet, again and again, what they report lines up — simple versions of the adult patterns. Deceased relatives. A great light. Angels (often without wings, which no child would have imagined on their own).17 Encounters with Jesus that carry the particular tenderness Jesus had for children in the Gospels.
The pediatric oncologist Diane Komp, a Yale Medical School professor who described herself as having drifted between agnosticism and atheism for much of her career, began to write about the dying children she cared for because she could not any longer explain away what they were saying.18 One of her patients, a six-year-old named Mary Beth, had not been told she was dying — her parents had asked the doctors to keep that from her. And yet one day her mother told Komp of a dream Mary Beth had reported. In the dream, Jesus came to her with one of her grandfathers who had died before she was born. Together they told her not to be afraid, that she would soon be with them. She died peacefully on Christmas Eve.19
The nursing researcher Angela Ethier, in a doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas Health Science Center, studied the reports of parents whose children had died of cancer. She found consistent themes: children knew they were dying before anyone told them, often reported being shown the other side in advance, often timed their own deaths around visits, and, strikingly, often seemed to become the pastoral figures for their own grieving parents. One mother described it this way: "I feel like he told us, 'I am going, it is okay for you guys to let go of me. I am not sad and you don't need to be sad.' I feel like he was the leader in the whole thing. We were more like the child, and he was the parent."20
None of this is required for Christian hope. Scripture is enough on its own. But the research is worth knowing, for two reasons. One, when your child tells you they dreamed of Grandma last night and Grandma said she was okay, you should not shame them into silence. What your child saw is part of a deep, broad pattern that careful researchers have been documenting for decades. Two, if you or your child ever stands near the edge of death yourselves, you should know that what you may see there is not necessarily nothing. It may be exactly what Jesus has been preparing for you all along.
What the Research on Children Suggests. Across multiple studies — Morse's Seattle Children's Hospital research, Komp's pediatric oncology work at Yale, Ethier's qualitative dissertation, Fenwick's end-of-life studies, and a growing international literature — children who come close to death or who are dying report experiences with the same core shape as adults: peace, light, deceased loved ones, and often a meeting with Jesus. They report these things without prior expectations, often without even knowing they are dying, and usually with a calm that surprises the adults around them. This does not prove anything by itself. But it adds striking corroboration to what Scripture already tells us: death is not the last word, and children — in whatever they experience at the edge — are not forgotten.
There is no more catastrophic form of childhood loss than the death of a parent. Every part of a child's life is reorganized around it. Studies going back decades have shown that the death of a parent in childhood raises long-term risks of depression, anxiety, and complicated bereavement — especially when the surviving family system cannot hold the child well.21 That is the honest picture.
The more hopeful picture is this: the risks are not destiny. Children whose surviving parent, extended family, and church community surround them with specific, sustained, honest love grow into adults whose grief is real, whose father or mother is never forgotten, and whose lives are whole. This is the long arc of pastoral care. It is not a six-month project. It is a decade-and-longer commitment.
The hardest part of this loss for the surviving parent is that the parent is, themselves, shattered. The six-year-old who just lost her mother is being cared for by a father who just lost his wife. He is not at his best. He cannot be. He is in no condition to be the primary bereavement companion for his daughter — and yet he is the person she wakes up crying for at two in the morning.
This is where the church community's calling is specific and non-optional. When a parent dies in your congregation, you do not simply support the widow or widower. You adopt the orphaned child — not legally, but pastorally. You become an aunt, an uncle, a grandmother, a youth leader, a godparent in truth. You take the child to the zoo. You take the teenager out for coffee. You send the birthday card without being asked. You remember the school play. You show up on Father's Day or Mother's Day, the hardest days of the year. You do this not for a year but for twenty.22 If you do not have the structure to do this, build it.
Specialized bereavement programs for children — the Dougy Center in Portland is the most influential model — exist in many cities and should be known by every pastor in that city.23 These programs allow children to grieve with other children who have also lost someone. The relief of being with other kids who "get it" is not a small thing. It is often the first place a grieving child has felt normal since the funeral.
Help the child maintain active memory of the parent who died. Keep pictures up. Tell stories. Celebrate the birthday. Let the child ask what Daddy was like at her age. Let her see the video of his wedding. Let her wear his old T-shirt to bed when she wants to. None of this slows her grief. All of it roots her in the truth that her father was real, that he loved her, that he is still hers.
The death of a sibling is a particular grief that, in most families, gets less attention than it should. The parents are devastated. The surviving child — sometimes called, in the grief literature, the "forgotten griever" — often becomes invisible in the storm.24
Siblings carry wounds that are specific to their role. They may feel guilty for being alive. They may feel guilty for any pre-death conflict with the sibling ("I said I hated him last week"). They may feel guilty for feeling relieved when a long illness ended. They may feel guilty for the attention the death has taken from them. They may watch their parents grieving and conclude, quietly, that they are supposed to be strong now — because Mom and Dad can't handle one more thing.
One of the dynamics parents must name and resist is the "replacement child" temptation — the subtle pressure on the surviving sibling to become the academic star, the athlete, the singer, the joy-bringer the dead child was. Whatever your lost child was going to be, your living child is still their own person and must be allowed to be.
Surviving siblings benefit from spaces where they are not just "the brother of the one who died" or "the sister of the one who died." They need people in their life who knew them before the loss and who will let them be themselves — goofy or quiet or moody or stubborn. The grief is part of them now. It is not all of them.
Talk about the sibling who died. Use their name. Put their picture up. Make room in family traditions. A surviving sibling who grows up in a house where the dead child is never mentioned will sometimes conclude, wrongly, that they themselves were loved less — because if their sibling had been "really loved," surely the family could bear to say their name.
For many children, the death of a grandparent is the first death they will truly know. This matters. What a child learns from that first loss — how the adults around them speak of the deceased, how the funeral is handled, how heaven is described, whether tears are allowed — will shape the child's theology of death for the rest of their life.
Handle this moment with specific care. Do not minimize the death ("Grandpa lived a long life — don't be too sad"). Do not over-dramatize it either. Use the moment to lay plain, true foundations: people die, grief is real and allowed, Jesus holds the ones we love, we will see them again.
A child's first death is a formative theological event. You are not interrupting their childhood with something grim. You are helping them know, for the rest of their life, that God is still with us in the dark.
Teenagers have a hard time. They grieve like adults, but they have almost none of the adult tools for grief. They may feel as deeply as any widow, and yet they are expected to go to biology class the next morning.
Teenagers' grief frequently disguises itself. Watch for:
Withdrawal. The teen who used to be social pulls back. Spends more time in the room. Stops returning friends' messages. Comes to meals only when forced.
Anger. A teenager's grief often emerges as sudden, sharp anger — at parents, at God, at teachers, at traffic. The anger is not the enemy. The anger is the grief's spokesperson.
Risky behavior. Substance use. Reckless driving. Self-harm. New friends with unclear reputations. Any of these emerging in the months after a major loss should be taken seriously, not dismissed as a phase.
Academic change. Grades may crater. Attention may evaporate. The straight-A student may suddenly not care about the AP exam. This is often grief, not rebellion.
Silence. The hardest to spot. A teenager who will not speak of the loss at all — not once, not even with close friends — may be carrying it alone in ways that are dangerous over time.
Teens benefit from peer bereavement support — other teens who have lost someone. They also benefit enormously from a trusted adult who is not the grieving parent. This is often where a youth pastor, an aunt, a grandparent, a best friend's mom earns their keep. The teenager cannot carry the surviving parent's grief. They need someone who can just be present to their grief — without also being drowning in their own.
Engage their theological questions honestly. A teenager asking "Why would God allow this?" deserves a real answer — or at least the real attempt at one. The worst thing you can do is shut the question down ("You shouldn't question God"). The next worst is answer it glibly. The best is to sit in the question with them, offer what Scripture really does say, acknowledge what it does not settle, and let them keep wrestling. Tim Keller's Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering is an excellent gift for a grieving teenager who can read at that level. Nancy Guthrie's work is another. Do not be afraid of their doubts. Faith that survives doubt is faith that lasts.25
And pray for them specifically. A teenager whose name is being held, in prayer, by a trusted adult — day after day, year after year — is being carried in ways they will only later recognize.
A brief but important word. Children with developmental or intellectual disabilities grieve. Their expressions of grief may differ — through behavior change, regression, sensory reactions, altered routines, or extended emotional responses. Do not assume a child with a disability "does not understand" simply because they cannot articulate their grief in familiar words.
Use appropriate supports. Picture schedules help some children process what has happened. Social stories (simple illustrated narratives about the death and the funeral) can prepare a child for change. Continue to say the dead person's name. Invite participation at whatever level the child is capable of. Many children with disabilities show an unusual sensitivity to spiritual realities — listen to their reports of dreams, sensings, and comforts with the same respect you would extend to any child.
Let us return to Bethany and her seven-year-old Olivia. A few weeks after the phone call with her pastor, Bethany was tucking Olivia in. Olivia, looking at the ceiling, asked the question again. Not the same one. A new version of it.
"Mom, is Daddy okay right now?"
Bethany had been practicing. She had read a little. She had prayed a lot. She took a breath and said: "Yes. Daddy is okay. Daddy's body stopped working and got buried, and we are going to miss his body for a long, long time. But the part of Daddy that was really him — his soul — is with Jesus now. And Jesus is taking care of him. And someday, when Jesus makes everything new, Daddy is going to get a new body, and we're going to see him again. And in the meantime, Daddy still loves you. And so do I. And so does God."
Olivia thought for a moment. Then she said, "Okay, Mom." She rolled over. She fell asleep.
That is what this work looks like. Not a single, perfect speech. A small, true answer, offered again and again, by a broken parent who is willing to keep showing up. Your children will remember your trying more than your wording. They will remember your presence more than your theology. They will remember that when they asked you the biggest question of their little lives, you did not turn away.
A Note on Discernment: When a Grieving Child May Need Extra Help. Most children, given honest information, steady adults, patient rituals, and time, will grieve and slowly integrate the loss. Some children need more. Consider consulting a child therapist — ideally one with specific grief training, and ideally a believer — when a child shows any of the following: persistent school refusal lasting more than a few weeks; prolonged regression (bedwetting, loss of speech milestones, extended clinginess) beyond about six months; sustained inability to speak of the person who died at all; suicidal talk at any age; self-harm; substance use in a teenager; persistent depression that does not lift; academic collapse lasting a semester or more. These are not signs of spiritual failure. They are signs that a specific, trained helper should join the circle. Asking for that help is one of the most loving things a parent or pastor can do.
Sit with these questions. Carry them gently.
1. Think of a child or teenager you love who has experienced a death. What did they ask? What did you say? What, looking back, do you wish you had said differently?
2. What words about death did the adults in your life use when you were a child? How have those words shaped your own grief now?
3. Is there a grieving child in your church right now whose grief is quietly being missed? What is one specific thing you could do this week?
4. What does it mean to you that Jesus welcomed children, laid his hands on them, and blessed them? How does that picture change how you speak to a grieving child in your life?
5. Has a child in your life reported a dream, a sensing, or some other experience of the person who died? How did you receive it? How might you receive the next one?
6. If you are a grieving parent, how are you caring for your children's grief while also carrying your own? Who is helping you do both?
7. What is one simple, true sentence you could say to a grieving child in your life this week — and then keep saying, as often as they need to hear it?
This section is for the pastor, children's minister, youth leader, small group leader, deacon, Sunday school teacher, and lay visitor whose job it is to walk alongside the young grievers in your congregation. A few pieces of counsel, gathered from the literature and from the pastoral work itself.
Grieving children are almost always overlooked in the storm of adult grief. Your first job is to see them. When a death hits a family in your church, your first question to the surviving adults, within the first week, should be: "How can I help you with the kids?" Not "How are the kids?" — which is answerable with a shrug. But "How can I help you with the kids?" — which actually opens a door.
Most surviving parents are themselves too overwhelmed to lead their children's grief. They know this. They are often ashamed of it. Offer them real, specific partnership, not extra guilt. "Can I take the girls to the park Saturday?" is a more useful sentence than "Let me know if you need anything."
A dying or grieving child is sometimes more spiritually attuned than the adults. The research in Ethier, Komp, and Morse shows this consistently. Listen to what they say. Do not dismiss them. Let the child in your congregation who tells you they dreamed of Grandpa be heard as a serious witness — not patronized, not medicalized, not shut down.
"You can ask me anything. I will tell you what I know. And I will sit with you when you are sad."
"It's okay to cry. It's okay to not cry. You can do what you need to do."
"Tell me about [the person who died]. What do you remember? What do you miss the most?"
"Jesus loves you. And he loves [the person who died]. And he is taking care of [them] right now."
"I'm going to keep coming back. I'm not going to go away."
"Be strong for Mom." This lays a weight on a small back that was never theirs to carry. A child should not be the support system for a grieving parent. That is the adult community's job.
"Don't cry." Tears are the body's grammar for love. Do not take them away.
"They're in a better place." This is meant kindly, but it can land badly. Many children will think, correctly, then why am I still here, and why are we all sad? Instead: "They are with Jesus, and Jesus is taking care of them. We're going to miss them every day until we see them again."
"At least you still have [other parent / other sibling]." Never begin a sentence with "at least" with a grieving child. You are trying to minimize what cannot and should not be minimized.
"Now you're the man of the house." Do not make a grieving child stand in for a dead parent. Ever.
"What have you been thinking about lately?"
"What do you remember about [the person who died]?"
"Is there anything you've been wondering about but haven't asked?"
"What do you miss the most right now?"
"How can I pray for you this week?"
"How are the kids doing — really? Which one are you most worried about right now?"
"What has come up that you don't know how to answer?"
"Who in our church has been showing up for the kids specifically?"
"Would it help if I or someone else took [the child] out for one-on-one time?"
"Can I help you think about [Christmas / the birthday / the anniversary]?"
Do not become the only person in a grieving child's life. Build a team. A pastor who becomes the sole substitute caregiver for a grieving child is setting up both the child and himself for complications. Distribute the love through the body.
Do not oversell the child's faith. Children do come to real faith early, including in crisis. But do not pressure a grieving child to make a public profession or a dramatic spiritual decision in the first months after a death. Let their walk with Jesus unfold at the pace God is actually setting.
Do not assume healing has happened when the outward signs look good. A teen who is back to school, back to sports, and laughing again may still be processing the loss in deep ways we cannot see. Keep the door open.
Know your own limits. If a child is in significant distress — suicidal talk, self-harm, persistent depression, substance use, prolonged regression — do not try to handle it alone. Build your referral network of Christian child and adolescent therapists before you need them. The time to find a good therapist for a grieving eleven-year-old is not after the crisis. It is now.
Most churches have children's ministry teams. Very few of them are trained for grief. Change that. A short annual training — an hour or two — can equip your team to recognize, receive, and respond to grieving children. Cover the developmental stages. Cover the words to use and the words to avoid. Cover the signs that a child needs more than the team can offer. Name the children in your congregation who have had a recent loss, and equip every teacher to say the lost person's name with ease.
Identify a point person — ideally someone with some counseling or teaching background in child development — who leads the grief response when a family in the church suffers a death. This person does not replace the pastor. They partner with the pastor, handling the specifically-children-shaped parts of the care.
Integrate grieving children into ongoing programming without pretending nothing happened. A teacher who opens a Sunday morning class with, "We've been praying for the Nguyen family this week — Mr. Nguyen's dad died, and we want Mia and Isaac to know we love them" is doing real ministry. So is a teacher who, six months later, quietly remembers the anniversary and slips Mia a card. This is how a church becomes a place a grieving child can grow up in.
Many surviving parents will not know how to talk to their children about the death. They will be afraid of saying the wrong thing. They will be second-guessing every word. Offer specific help. Sit down with them. Walk them through the words in this chapter. Role-play the hard questions. Give them permission to say "I don't know." Remind them that children remember their parents' presence more than their parents' phrasing. A grieving father who sits on the bed and cries with his daughter and says, "I miss him too, and I don't have all the answers, but Jesus has him," has done something beautiful. He does not need a script.
Consider these five simple actions in the coming weeks.
One: identify the grieving children in your congregation. Make a list. Include recent losses and losses that are years old. Pray over this list by name.
Two: find out which of your local bereavement resources serve children. Look up your nearest Dougy Center-affiliated program, your local hospice's children's services, and any Christian counselors who specialize in child and adolescent grief. Put their names in your phone. You will need them.
Three: train one or two key leaders in basic children's grief care. A short course, a good book (start with Wolfelt's Healing the Grieving Heart for Kids or Kroen's Helping Children Cope with the Loss of a Loved One), and a commitment to apply it are enough to make a real difference.
Four: build grief awareness into your annual children's ministry rhythm. All Saints' Day, or an annual remembrance Sunday, is a gift to grieving children (and adults). Be willing to say the names.
Five: on a day when no crisis is happening, sit down with a child in your congregation who has experienced a loss years ago. Ask them how they are now. Listen. You will be the one person that week who remembered.
Your children are the Lord's. He has been tender with them from the beginning. "Let the little children come to me; do not hinder them" is not a command for that one afternoon in Galilee. It is a command for every week of every year in every church. Welcome them. Bless them. Do not hinder them. They belong to Jesus, and he is paying close attention — particularly when their hearts are heavy.
William Kroen, Helping Children Cope with the Loss of a Loved One: A Guide for Grownups (Minneapolis: Free Spirit Publishing, 1996). A brief, warm, practical guide — perhaps the most useful single volume a parent or pastor can own on this topic.
Alan Wolfelt, Healing the Grieving Heart for Kids: 100 Practical Ideas for Families, Friends & Caregivers (Companion Press, 2001). Wolfelt's "companion" approach is exactly the right register for accompanying a grieving child.
The Dougy Center, 35 Ways to Help a Grieving Child, and the wider Dougy Center Guidebook Series (Portland: The Dougy Center). Short, specific, clinically informed. Every pastor should have these on the shelf.
Melvin Morse with Paul Perry, Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children (New York: Villard Books, 1990). The foundational work on children's NDEs. Non-Christian framing, but the data are striking and valuable.
Diane M. Komp, A Window to Heaven: When Children See Life in Death (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992). A Yale pediatric oncologist's personal account of how the faith of dying children drew her into Christian faith.
Pat Schwiebert and Chuck DeKlyen, Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss (Portland: Grief Watch, 2005). A picture book for children and adults that names grief honestly. A gift to read with a grieving child of any age.
1 William C. Kroen, Helping Children Cope with the Loss of a Loved One: A Guide for Grownups (Minneapolis: Free Spirit Publishing, 1996), 3–12. Kroen is one of the clearest contemporary voices on the reality of children's grief across the full developmental span. ↩
2 Phyllis R. Silverman, Never Too Young to Know: Death in Children's Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 41–58, summarizes the research on young children's awareness of loss. See also J. William Worden, Children and Grief: When a Parent Dies (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 37–62. ↩
3 Maria Nagy, "The Child's Theories Concerning Death," Journal of Genetic Psychology 73 (1948): 3–27. Nagy's stage-based description of children's understanding has been refined by later researchers but remains the classic starting point. ↩
4 Alan D. Wolfelt, Healing the Grieving Heart for Kids: 100 Practical Ideas for Families, Friends, and Caregivers (Fort Collins, CO: Companion Press, 2001); Kroen, Helping Children Cope; The Dougy Center, 35 Ways to Help a Grieving Child (Portland: The Dougy Center, 1999). ↩
5 On magical thinking and self-blame in young grievers, see Linda Goldman, Life and Loss: A Guide to Help Grieving Children, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 27–40. ↩
6 Worden, Children and Grief, 63–91, documents the tendency of school-age children to conceal grief in order to protect surviving parents — a finding consistent across subsequent replications. ↩
7 Helen Fitzgerald, The Grieving Teen: A Guide for Teenagers and Their Friends (New York: Fireside, 2000), 3–26. See also David E. Balk, Helping the Bereaved College Student (New York: Springer, 2011). ↩
8 The elements listed here synthesize Wolfelt, Kroen, Silverman, Goldman, and the Dougy Center guides. The convergence across Christian and secular sources is striking. ↩
9 Fred Rogers, Mister Rogers Talks with Parents (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), chap. on death and loss. Rogers's guidance on using plain language ("died," "dead") with young children has been broadly confirmed by later research. ↩
10 Wolfelt, Healing the Grieving Heart for Kids, 78–85; Kroen, Helping Children Cope, 48–56; The Dougy Center, Helping Children Cope with Death (Portland: The Dougy Center, 2004). ↩
11 J. William Worden, Phyllis R. Silverman, et al., "Parental Death and the Adjustment of School-Age Children," Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 33, no. 2 (1996): 91–102. The image of "puddles" of grief is developed widely in Worden's clinical writing. ↩
12 John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), chaps. 3–5; Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), chap. on the soul. For the use of substance dualism in pastoral care for grief, see Chapter 3 of the present volume. ↩
13 Louis E. LaGrand, Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Encounters of the Bereaved (New York: Berkley, 2006), chap. on children's encounters. See also the fuller discussion in Chapters 22–24 of the present volume. ↩
14 Bill Guggenheim and Judy Guggenheim, Hello From Heaven! (New York: Bantam, 1995), chap. on children. ↩
15 Melvin Morse with Paul Perry, Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children (New York: Villard Books, 1990), 3–21. The Katie case is also summarized in J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1 (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023), in the chapter "Children's Reports of Near-Death Experiences Reinforce DBEs." ↩
16 Melvin Morse, quoted in Raymond Moody, The Light Beyond (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 108: the simplest explanation of children's near-death experiences is that they are glimpses into a spiritual reality beyond death. ↩
17 William Barrett, Deathbed Visions (Guildford, UK: White Crow Books, 2011), 14, 49–55. Barrett's century-old observation that dying children frequently describe angels without wings — contrary to every picture book they had ever seen — remains a striking data point against the expectation-based explanation of deathbed experiences. ↩
18 Diane M. Komp, A Window to Heaven: When Children See Life in Death (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 22–28. ↩
19 Komp, A Window to Heaven, 35–36. The case is also discussed in Miller, Deathbed Experiences, chap. on children's DBEs. ↩
20 Angela M. Ethier, "Exploring Parents' Memories of Their Child's Death Related Sensory Experiences as a Dimension of Grieving" (Doctor of Science in Nursing diss., University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Nursing, May 2007), 13, 53. See also Angela M. Ethier, "Death Related Sensory Experiences," Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing 22, no. 2 (2005): 110. ↩
21 Irwin Sandler, Tim Ayers, Sharlene Wolchik, et al., "The Family Bereavement Program: Efficacy Evaluation of a Theory-Based Prevention Program for Parentally Bereaved Children and Adolescents," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 71, no. 3 (2003): 587–600. The research on long-term outcomes of parental bereavement in childhood has generated a large literature; see especially the Harvard Child Bereavement Study summarized in Worden, Children and Grief. ↩
22 On the long horizon of church-community care for orphaned children, see Nancy Guthrie, Hoping for Heaven (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2005), passim, for the pastoral register this calls for. ↩
23 The Dougy Center, What About the Kids? Understanding Their Needs in Funeral Planning and Services (Portland: The Dougy Center, 1999). The Dougy Center model has been replicated in dozens of cities across North America and is referenced in most contemporary children's grief literature. ↩
24 Betty Davies, Shadows in the Sun: The Experiences of Sibling Bereavement in Childhood (Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel, 1999). On the "replacement child" dynamic, see also Therese A. Rando, ed., Parental Loss of a Child (Champaign, IL: Research Press, 1986). ↩
25 Timothy Keller, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering (New York: Dutton, 2013); Nancy Guthrie, Holding On to Hope: A Pathway Through Suffering to the Heart of God (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2002). Both are unusually readable for teenagers who can handle serious prose. ↩
Balk, David E. Helping the Bereaved College Student. New York: Springer, 2011.
Barrett, William. Deathbed Visions. Guildford, UK: White Crow Books, 2011.
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.
Davies, Betty. Shadows in the Sun: The Experiences of Sibling Bereavement in Childhood. Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel, 1999.
The Dougy Center. 35 Ways to Help a Grieving Child. Portland: The Dougy Center, 1999.
The Dougy Center. Helping Children Cope with Death. Portland: The Dougy Center, 2004.
The Dougy Center. What About the Kids? Understanding Their Needs in Funeral Planning and Services. Portland: The Dougy Center, 1999.
Ethier, Angela M. "Death Related Sensory Experiences." Journal of Pediatric Oncology Nursing 22, no. 2 (2005): 104–11.
Ethier, Angela M. "Exploring Parents' Memories of Their Child's Death Related Sensory Experiences as a Dimension of Grieving." Doctor of Science in Nursing dissertation, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Nursing, May 2007.
Farris, Joshua R. An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020.
Fitzgerald, Helen. The Grieving Teen: A Guide for Teenagers and Their Friends. New York: Fireside, 2000.
Goldman, Linda. Life and Loss: A Guide to Help Grieving Children. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Guggenheim, Bill, and Judy Guggenheim. Hello From Heaven! New York: Bantam, 1995.
Guthrie, Nancy. Holding On to Hope: A Pathway Through Suffering to the Heart of God. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2002.
Guthrie, Nancy. Hoping for Heaven. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale, 2005.
Keller, Timothy. Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering. New York: Dutton, 2013.
Komp, Diane M. A Window to Heaven: When Children See Life in Death. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992.
Kroen, William C. Helping Children Cope with the Loss of a Loved One: A Guide for Grownups. Minneapolis: Free Spirit Publishing, 1996.
LaGrand, Louis E. Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Encounters of the Bereaved. New York: Berkley, 2006.
Miller, J. Steve. Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Moody, Raymond. The Light Beyond. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.
Morse, Melvin, with Paul Perry. Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children. New York: Villard Books, 1990.
Nagy, Maria. "The Child's Theories Concerning Death." Journal of Genetic Psychology 73 (1948): 3–27.
Rando, Therese A., ed. Parental Loss of a Child. Champaign, IL: Research Press, 1986.
Rogers, Fred. Mister Rogers Talks with Parents. New York: Berkley Books, 1983.
Sandler, Irwin, Tim Ayers, Sharlene Wolchik, et al. "The Family Bereavement Program: Efficacy Evaluation of a Theory-Based Prevention Program for Parentally Bereaved Children and Adolescents." Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 71, no. 3 (2003): 587–600.
Silverman, Phyllis R. Never Too Young to Know: Death in Children's Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Wolfelt, Alan D. Healing the Grieving Heart for Kids: 100 Practical Ideas for Families, Friends, and Caregivers. Fort Collins, CO: Companion Press, 2001.
Worden, J. William. Children and Grief: When a Parent Dies. New York: Guilford Press, 1996.
Worden, J. William, Phyllis R. Silverman, et al. "Parental Death and the Adjustment of School-Age Children." Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 33, no. 2 (1996): 91–102.