Chapter 30
Four months after his mother died of cancer, eight-year-old Jamie was building a Lego spaceship on the living room floor. He had not cried once. Not at the hospital. Not at the funeral. Not at the long, quiet dinners his father tried to make feel normal.
He went to school. He laughed at cartoons. He ate his cereal. To anyone watching, he looked like a boy who had moved on, or maybe a boy who had not yet started.
His father was worried. He was also ashamed of being worried. What kind of father wishes his son would cry more? But something felt wrong. And the wrong of it kept him awake at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering if Jamie was broken — or if he himself was broken for not knowing how to help.
When Pastor Mike came to visit, Jamie said hello and slipped quietly down the hallway to his room. The father sighed. “He does that now,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Pastor Mike set down his coffee. “May I follow him?”
The father nodded.
The pastor walked down the hallway and tapped lightly on Jamie’s door. He did not ask how Jamie was feeling. He did not bring up the funeral. He sat down on the carpet, his back against the bed, and waited until Jamie sat down beside him with a Lego brick in his hand.
Then Pastor Mike said, gently, “Tell me about your mom.”
Chapter Thesis: Grieving children and teens are the forgotten mourners. The grown-ups around them grieve loudly — and rightly — and we often assume the kids are quietly bouncing back, since they don’t always cry and sometimes seem fine. They are not fine. They are grieving in their own way, on their own timeline, with smaller hands and bigger questions than we usually imagine. This chapter is for the parents, pastors, and caregivers who want to walk with these young grievers honestly and gently — for the next four months, and for the next four decades.
Adult grief is often described as waves on an ocean. Some are small. Some knock you down. They keep coming, day after day, for a long, long time.
Children’s grief is more like puddles.
A grieving child steps into the puddle. She gets wet. She cries. She asks a hard question. And then — sometimes only minutes later — she steps out of the puddle and goes to play.1
This can be confusing. We see a child laughing on the trampoline an hour after weeping at bedtime, and we wonder if something is wrong with her grief.
Nothing is wrong with her grief. Her young heart is not built to stay submerged in deep adult water yet. So she dips in, and she dips out.
This pattern is not denial. Researchers and grief therapists who work with children call it intermittent or puddle grief, and it is developmentally normal.2 Eight-year-old Jamie was not heartless. He was building a Lego spaceship in between the puddles.
Decades of research with bereaved children support what every experienced grief counselor will tell you: intermittent grief is the rule, not the exception. Children dip into sorrow, then return to play, often within minutes. This pattern reflects healthy resilience, not denial — and it is found in grieving children across cultures.
For parents, the most helpful thing to know is this: do not pull a child into a deeper puddle than she is ready for. Do not be alarmed when she steps out of the one she is in. Be there for the puddle. Be there for the play. Both are real grief.
There is one caution. A child who never seems to step into the puddle for many months — who never asks about the loved one, never seems sad — may need a gentle door opened by a trusted adult. Not pressed. Just opened. We will return to this near the end.
A child’s understanding of death is not the same as ours. It grows as she grows. Knowing roughly where a child is — by age — helps us speak to her in words she can actually hold.
Very young children do not yet understand that death is permanent. They may ask, again and again, when Mommy is coming back. They may worry that the dead person is cold, or hungry, or scared. Their thinking is concrete and magical at the same time. A little one this age may quietly believe that her own thoughts caused the death — I was mad at Daddy yesterday, and now Daddy is dead. Reassurance has to be repeated, and repeated.3
At this age children begin to grasp that death is permanent. They become very concrete. They ask hard questions, sometimes at the dinner table: Where is Daddy’s body? Will the worms eat him? They may also feel guilty. Many children this age secretly believe the death was their fault — for being bad, for not praying enough. This guilt almost never comes out unless a trusted adult specifically asks about it.4
Children in this stage understand death much like adults do. They know it is permanent. They begin to ask the bigger questions: Why did this happen? Is God real? Will I die too? Sometimes they want privacy in their grief. They may write things in a journal or talk only to a trusted friend.
Teens have a full adult understanding of death held in a young, raw heart. They get their own section below.
The single most useful thing for an adult to remember across all four stages is this: children do not grow out of their grief by skipping over the questions. They grow through it by being met where they are.
When the words are hard, we are tempted to soften them. Most of those soft words make things worse for children.
“Grandma went to sleep.” A small child, hearing this, may grow afraid of bedtime. If sleep is what took Grandma, what will sleep do to me? Some children will refuse to nap for weeks.
“We lost Daddy.” Lost where? Why aren’t we looking? A young child takes our words literally.
“God needed another angel.” Now God is the one who took Daddy away. The God we are trying to teach this child to love.5
The honest words are the kind ones. Died. Death. His body stopped working.
Try this, for a younger child:
Daddy’s body got too sick to keep working. The doctors did everything they could. Now Daddy’s body has died. That means it does not move, breathe, or feel anything anymore. We are very sad because we miss him so much. Daddy loved you. He loved you more than anything in the world. That has not changed.
Then stop and listen. Let her ask. If she asks something you don’t know how to answer, you can say, “That’s a really good question. I don’t know the whole answer. Can we think about it together?”
Don’t overload a child with detail. Drip it slowly, over weeks and months. Children come back to the same question many times, in slightly different words, because they are turning it over in their hands like a stone, examining each side. That is healthy.6
And don’t be afraid to cry in front of them. A child who sees a grown-up cry learns that crying is safe. Our tears are part of their lesson.
Should children come to the funeral?
Almost always, yes. With preparation.7
For decades, well-meaning relatives whisked children away from funerals to “spare them.” We now know — from grief researchers, child psychologists, and pastors who have walked many families through loss — that hiding death from children produces more fear, not less. The unknown is scarier than the known. A child who is told nothing about Grandpa’s funeral fills in the blanks with frightening pictures from her own imagination.8
Preparation makes the difference. Tell the child, ahead of time, what she will see. There will be a casket. Daddy’s body will be in it. He will not move. He will not talk. His body will look like he is sleeping, but he is not sleeping — he died. People will be sad. Some people will cry. That is okay. We will be sad too. We will hold your hand the whole time.
Give the child something to do. A flower to place on the casket. A candle to light. A prayer to say. A song to sing with the family. Children grieve through the body, not just the mind. Doing something with their hands helps them know they are part of the family’s farewell.
Designate a trusted adult — not the most heart-broken parent — whose job is to take the child out if she needs a break. Let the child set the pace.
After the funeral, expect questions for weeks. Where is the casket now? What about Daddy’s wedding ring? These are not morbid. They are how children make peace with reality. Answer simply.
A child who is included in the family’s grieving — at her own size, with her own job, with her own questions — is not traumatized by the funeral. She is loved through it.
This is where the foundation laid in earlier chapters comes home to a child.
Tell her the truth, simply: Mom loved Jesus. Now Mom is with Jesus. Jesus loves her even more than we do. We will see her again.
Allow her to ask questions. Many will come.
What is she doing right now?
We do not have to invent details. We can say: “The Bible tells us that being with Jesus is the best thing in the world. Mom is happy. She is not in pain anymore. She is with Jesus, and one day we will be with Jesus too, and we will see her there.” That is enough. We do not need to invent a story about Mom baking cupcakes in heaven. Children can tell the difference between something we know and something we are pretending. The real hope is bigger than the cute one.9
Can she see me?
We can be honest here, too. Scripture does not give us a clear yes or no. But we can say something like, “Mom is with Jesus, and Jesus sees you, and Jesus loves you. Mom loves you too, and Jesus is taking very good care of her.”
Where is heaven?
A child can hold this answer: “Heaven is where Jesus is. The Bible says that people who loved Jesus go to be with Him when they die. One day Jesus will come back, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and we will all be together.”10
The center of all of this is Jesus. Not the streets of gold. Not the angels. Jesus. He is the One who said:
“And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the 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 10:13–16 (ESV)11
Jesus loves children. He is not annoyed by their questions. He invited them into His arms. And He has, in His arms now, the woman who is your child’s mother.
Teens grieve like adults. But they grieve as adults in formation.
A teen has a full adult understanding of death — and a young, raw, half-formed heart trying to figure out who she is going to be. When grief lands in that already-stormy season, it shakes everything.
Several patterns are common.
Identity reformation. A 15-year-old whose father has died is not just sad. She is being asked, by her own mind, who she is now. So much of who we are is built in relationship to the people we love. When one of those people dies, the teen has to rebuild parts of her self.12
Hidden grief. Most teens hide grief from peers. They want to look normal at school. They smile through the day and cry only at night. Adults often miss this entirely.
Risk-taking. Some teens grieve by pushing against limits — driving fast, drinking, fighting. It is grief in a leather jacket. Not all teens do this. But enough do that we have to watch for it.
Sharp spiritual questions. Why did God let this happen? Is God even real? Was I lied to about God? These questions feel destabilizing to parents. They are not destabilizing to God. He can hold every one of them. The pastoral instinct is not to argue. It is to listen, and to keep showing up.
Pressure to be the rock. A teen whose mother has died is sometimes told, by family or by herself, that she has to “be strong for Dad now.” This is too much weight for a teenager. It is also unfair. She is the child. She gets to grieve as a child.
The right gift to give a grieving teen, alongside her parents, is a safe adult outside the home. A youth pastor. A counselor. A grandfather. A trusted teacher.13
This is not a problem to fix. It is the shape of human love. We grieve at the size of what we lost.
In the years and decades to come, a child who loses a parent will re-grieve at the milestones. The first day of high school, where the empty seat in the audience is louder than any cheer. The college acceptance letter that no one will read aloud at the dinner table. The wedding day, when she walks down the aisle without Dad. The first child, when she holds the baby and cannot hand him to her mother. The age the parent was when they died.14
This re-grieving is not a failure to move on. It is grief growing up alongside the child.
I once sat with a woman in her sixties who walked into my office on the anniversary of her father’s death — more than fifty years after he died — and wept the way she had wanted to weep when she was eight. The tears did not embarrass her. They surprised her. She thought she was “over it.” She was not over it. She was finally being given permission to grieve what an eight-year-old never quite got to grieve.
Jerry Sittser, who lost his wife, mother, and daughter in a single car crash, writes that the soul does not shrink the loss; the soul grows around it.15 The same is true for grieving children, very slowly, over many years. The eight-year-old who cried at bedtime grows up. The grief does not become smaller. He becomes larger around it.
The pastoral implication is enormous. Do not assume the grief is “done” because the child has grown. A 35-year-old whose father died when she was 8 may walk into your office one day, weeping again, freshly. You are not seeing regression. You are seeing grief becoming an adult. Welcome her in. The church is allowed to grieve at every age.
A Note on When to Get Extra Help. Refer the child or teen for professional grief counseling if you see, lasting more than a few weeks: school avoidance or sustained academic decline; regressive behavior in older children; sustained behavioral changes that do not return to baseline; sleep or eating disruption that persists; or — in a teen — withdrawal, hopelessness, substance use, self-harm, or any talk of not wanting to be alive.16 These are not signs that you have failed. They are signs that the young person needs more help than you alone can give.
Sit with these gently. Do not feel you need to answer them all. Pick one or two and let the Spirit do the rest.
1. Are there children or teens in your life right now who are grieving — and who may not be getting the support they need?
2. What words about death did you grow up hearing? Were they honest? What did you carry into adulthood from those words?
3. If a young person in your life asked you, “Where is Mom now? Is she okay?” — what would you actually say? Try writing the words.
4. Is there a milestone coming up — a birthday, an anniversary, a graduation — when a child you love may grieve again?
5. Who is the safe adult, outside the immediate family, that a grieving teen in your life could turn to? If there is not one, can you help find one?
6. Where in this chapter did you feel something soften, ache, or notice God speaking?
7. Is there a part of your own childhood grief that may still need a kind word, even now?
A few priorities for the pastor, lay leader, or friend walking alongside a grieving child or teen.
Key observations. Children’s grief is intermittent and easily missed. The puddle pattern matters. Do not assume that a calm child is a fine child. Do not assume that a laughing child has forgotten. Stay near. Keep a low, soft watch. Teens hide grief from peers. They will be politely fine in front of their friends and youth group. The work happens in private. Make yourself available outside the public spaces — a walk after school, a drive to get coffee, a quick text on the anniversary. Most grieving teens will not bring it up. You have to.
What to say. To a young child: Tell me about your mom. What was your favorite thing about her? To an older child: It is okay to feel sad and to play. Both are real. You don’t have to choose. To a teen: I am not going anywhere. You can ask me anything, and I won’t make a big deal of it. I will just be here. To a grieving parent: Your child’s grief will look different from yours. That is not a failure. It is how children grieve.
What NOT to say. “You need to be strong for your dad now.” Children are not built to carry adult grief. We do not give them that job. “Mommy is in a better place.” This is true, but said without warmth, on the day of the funeral, it can feel cold. Pair the truth with tenderness, or do not say it yet. “She is watching you, so you better behave.” This turns the dead loved one into a heavenly hall monitor. It poisons both the memory and the hope. Don’t do it. To a teen: “I know exactly how you feel.” We don’t. Even if we lost a parent at the same age, we do not. Say instead, “I am so sorry. Tell me what you want me to know.”
Watch-outs. The amber callout above lists the key warning signs. Beyond those: a child who never asks any questions about the dead loved one for many months may need a gentle door opened by a trusted adult. Not pressed. Just opened. Sometimes a single question — “I was thinking about your dad today. Do you want to tell me a story about him?” — is enough.
Next steps. Keep showing up. Visit at the one-month mark. Visit at the six-month mark. Visit at the anniversary. Send a card on the birthday of the deceased. Mark the milestones the family will be afraid to mark on their own. Connect families to qualified resources — the Dougy Center, local child grief support groups, Christian counselors with specific grief training.
The single most pastoral thing you can do for a grieving child is to be the adult who remembers, year after year, that she lost someone, and to say her loved one’s name out loud in front of her. Your mom loved you. I remember her too. The name does not have to be whispered. The memory does not have to be hidden. The grief does not have to be shouldered alone.
William C. Kroen, Helping Children Cope with the Loss of a Loved One: A Guide for Grownups. Practical, gentle, age-by-age guidance from a counselor who has walked many families through loss.
Alan D. Wolfelt, Healing the Bereaved Child. A compassionate framework for adults walking with grieving kids; widely used in hospice training.
The Dougy Center, 35 Ways to Help a Grieving Child. Brief, accessible, and free; the Dougy Center has been a national leader in child grief care for decades.
Earl A. Grollman, Talking About Death: A Dialogue Between Parent and Child. A classic, often used by hospital chaplains, with a parent-child dialogue model.
Joey O’Connor, Heaven’s Not a Crying Place: Teaching Your Child About Funerals, Death, and the Life Beyond. Christian-specific, written for parents who want to integrate biblical hope into hard conversations.
Jerry Sittser, A Grace Disguised. Not a children’s grief book, but its long view of how the soul grows through loss is exactly the framework that fits a child’s lifelong grief.
1 The “puddle” metaphor is widely repeated in child grief literature. See William C. Kroen, Helping Children Cope with the Loss of a Loved One: A Guide for Grownups (Minneapolis: Free Spirit, 1996), 14–18; The Dougy Center, 35 Ways to Help a Grieving Child (Portland, OR: The Dougy Center, 1999), 6–8. ↩
2 Alan D. Wolfelt, Healing the Bereaved Child: Grief Gardening, Growth Through Grief, and Other Touchstones for Caregivers (Fort Collins, CO: Companion Press, 1996), 33–35. The pattern Wolfelt describes clinically aligns with the broader resilience research summarized in George A. Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 78–82, who emphasizes the developmentally appropriate resilience commonly observed in bereaved children. ↩
3 Kroen, Helping Children Cope, 21–28. On magical thinking and the difficulty of grasping permanence in young children, see also Wolfelt, Healing the Bereaved Child, 47–49. ↩
4 Earl A. Grollman, Talking About Death: A Dialogue Between Parent and Child, 3rd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 12–17. Grollman’s clinical experience with bereaved children, gathered over more than four decades, repeatedly surfaced hidden guilt as one of the most common — and most missed — features of child grief. ↩
5 Wolfelt, Healing the Bereaved Child, 89–92. Wolfelt has long argued that adult euphemisms about death — particularly “sleep” and “loss” language — produce identifiable fear patterns in young children. For Christian alternatives that hold both honesty and hope, see Joey O’Connor, Heaven’s Not a Crying Place: Teaching Your Child About Funerals, Death, and the Life Beyond (Grand Rapids: Revell, 1997), 41–43. ↩
6 Kroen, Helping Children Cope, 35–38, on children’s pattern of returning repeatedly to the same questions in slightly different forms over weeks and months. ↩
7 The Dougy Center, 35 Ways to Help a Grieving Child, 14–17. The strong consensus across child grief researchers — secular and Christian alike — is that children should generally attend funerals when prepared, with a designated trusted adult ready to take them out as needed. ↩
8 Wolfelt, Healing the Bereaved Child, 121–25, summarizing decades of clinical observation that protective avoidance increases rather than decreases child fear about death. ↩
9 On the wisdom of not inventing specific scenarios about heaven, see O’Connor, Heaven’s Not a Crying Place, 89–94. For the broader Christian doctrine that informs what we can faithfully tell a child about heaven and the conscious intermediate state, see John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), chap. 4, “The Intermediate State.” ↩
10 The biblical hope unfolds in two stages: the conscious intermediate state with Christ, and the future bodily resurrection at His return. See Chapter 2 of this book for the foundational treatment, and 1 Corinthians 15 and Revelation 21 for the resurrection horizon. For a pastoral application accessible to non-specialists, see John Burke, Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God’s Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015), chap. 1, “What If It’s True?” ↩
11 Mark 10:13–16. Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016), unless otherwise noted. ↩
12 On adolescent identity reformation in grief, see H. Norman Wright, Experiencing Grief (Nashville: B&H, 2004), 88–92. On teen risk-taking patterns following parental loss, see Bonanno, The Other Side of Sadness, 162–67. ↩
13 On the importance of safe adults outside the immediate home for grieving teens, see Wolfelt, Healing the Bereaved Child, 161–67. ↩
14 On re-grieving at developmental milestones, see Wolfelt, Healing the Bereaved Child, 173–78; Wright, Experiencing Grief, 94–98. The pattern of re-grieving at the age the parent died — sometimes called the “parental death anniversary” effect — is documented across multiple longitudinal studies of bereaved children. ↩
15 Jerry Sittser, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss, 20th anniversary ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021), 67–70. Sittser’s image — that the loss does not shrink, but the soul grows around it — has become one of the most quoted in pastoral grief literature for good reason: it captures, without minimizing, what actually happens in long-term bereavement. ↩
16 The Dougy Center (https://www.dougy.org), founded in Portland, Oregon, in 1982, is the longest-running child grief center in the United States and offers extensive free resources for caregivers. Local equivalents and Christian counseling networks — such as the American Association of Christian Counselors at https://www.aacc.net — can connect families to qualified, trauma-informed grief therapists. For pastoral discernment about referral thresholds, see Wolfelt, Healing the Bereaved Child, 191–98. ↩
Bonanno, George A. The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God’s Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015.
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.
The Dougy Center. 35 Ways to Help a Grieving Child. Portland, OR: The Dougy Center, 1999.
Grollman, Earl A. Talking About Death: A Dialogue Between Parent and Child. 3rd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016.
Kroen, William C. Helping Children Cope with the Loss of a Loved One: A Guide for Grownups. Minneapolis: Free Spirit, 1996.
O’Connor, Joey. Heaven’s Not a Crying Place: Teaching Your Child About Funerals, Death, and the Life Beyond. Grand Rapids: Revell, 1997.
Sittser, Jerry. A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss. 20th anniversary ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2021.
Wolfelt, Alan D. Healing the Bereaved Child: Grief Gardening, Growth Through Grief, and Other Touchstones for Caregivers. Fort Collins, CO: Companion Press, 1996.
Wright, H. Norman. Experiencing Grief. Nashville: B&H, 2004.