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Bereavement is the time a young person goes through after someone close to them dies. Grief is a natural response to loss, and children often grieve differently from adults, moving between deep sadness and seeming fine.
There is no right way to grieve and no timeline. What often helps is honest words, patience, and knowing all a child's feelings are okay. Most learn to live with the loss in time; a few need extra support.
Key takeaways
Watching your child grieve is one of the hardest experiences in parenting. It’s harder still when you’re grieving yourself, when the family is fractured by the loss, when you’re not sure if what you are seeing is normal grief or something that needs help, and when you’ve run out of useful things to say. Parents can be left feeling exhausted, frightened, and trying to support a young person through something that is incredibly painful.
This guide is for parents whose child has lost someone or something that mattered: a parent, sibling, grandparent, close friend, pet, or the family they used to have before a separation. It covers what bereavement and loss actually mean for a child or young person, how grief shows up at different ages, why it doesn't follow the textbook stages, what helps, what doesn't, and when professional support is worth seeking. Where we mention something briefly that has its own deeper article on our site, you'll find a link to read more.
Bereavement is the experience of someone we love dying. Grief is the response to that loss. Mourning is the way grief is expressed, and it’s shaped by culture, family, faith, and personality.
For children and young people, loss is broader than bereavement alone. A similar emotional response can follow a parental separation or divorce, a parent's serious illness, a sibling leaving home, a beloved pet dying, the end of a significant friendship, a move that breaks attachments, the loss of a teacher who mattered, or even the loss of a future the child had been counting on (a sports career derailed by injury, an exam result that closed off a hoped-for path). These losses can involve similar psychological work: integrating the reality that something important is gone, finding a way to keep the love or the meaning alive, and slowly rebuilding a life that the loss has reshaped.
One of the most influential modern models of grief is the Dual Process Model developed by Stroebe and Schut, described in a 2010 paper in Omega: Journal of Death and Dying.[1] The model describes grief:
Not as a linear set of stages but as an oscillation: the bereaved person moves between loss-oriented coping (feeling the pain, remembering, longing) and restoration-oriented coping (engaging with daily life, building new patterns, managing what comes next).” Stroebe, M. & Schut, H., 2010
The model proposes that people may move back and forth between the two.
This matters for parents because the old idea of grief as five neat stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) is misleading. Grief in children often oscillates rapidly, sometimes within an hour. A grieving child can be sobbing one moment and asking what's for dinner the next. Both responses are real. Neither cancels out the other.
It is far more common than parents often realise:
of children in Scotland have been bereaved of someone close in the family by the age of 10
In the last national survey, in 2004, around 1 in 29 school-age children had been bereaved of a parent or sibling[3]. Far higher numbers have lost grandparents, friends, or other significant figures. There is likely to be a bereaved child in most classrooms, and sometimes more than one.
Bereaved young people are, as a group, at higher risk of mental health difficulties [4]. Research on prolonged grief, much of it with adults, suggests the risk of grief becoming prolonged is higher when the death was sudden or traumatic, or when there was little support around the young person after the loss [5]. Many bereaved children do not go on to have these difficulties, and every child's grief is different.
A young person's capacity to make sense of death changes significantly with age. Understanding what your child is developmentally able to grasp helps you pitch conversations and expectations. These ages are a rough guide rather than fixed stages, and every child is different.
Under fives: Very young children often do not yet understand the permanence of death. They may ask repeatedly when the person is coming back, expect to see them again at the next family gathering, or behave as if nothing has happened for stretches of time. This is often part of how young children’s understanding develops, rather than denial. Repeated, simple, honest explanations can help. Avoid euphemisms like "gone to sleep" or "lost", which can produce frightening misunderstandings (a child told grandma "went to sleep" may become terrified of sleep).
Ages five to nine: Many children at this age begin to understand that death is permanent, but their understanding is often concrete and sometimes magical. They may ask very direct questions ("does it hurt to be dead?", "what happens to the body?") and worry about being responsible for the death in ways adults find startling. Reassurance about cause and a clear, calm explanation usually help.
Ages nine to twelve: A more adult understanding of death typically arrives at this stage. Many children become aware that everyone they love will eventually die, including themselves. This realisation can bring significant anxiety, and big questions about life and death may emerge. Pre-teens may also become very interested in the practicalities (funerals, what happens to belongings) as a way of managing the abstract enormity of the loss.
Teenagers: Teenagers usually understand death much as adults do, but may not yet have the experience or the emotional regulation skills to hold what's happening. Many teenagers grieve in private, sometimes to protect their parents, or grieve in compressed bursts in their room and then return to performing normality. Risk-taking, withdrawal, anger, and academic disengagement can all be part of grief, and are easy to misread as ordinary adolescence.
Grief in children rarely looks the way grief in adults looks. Common signs include:
These are common patterns, not a checklist. A grieving child may show few of them, and some of these changes can have other causes. If you’re worried, ask your child how they’re doing and talk to your GP or school.
Many of these signs overlap with anxiety, depression, school avoidance, and behavioural difficulties. Our pages on anxiety and anger explore some of the territory grief can spill into.
Grief in children and young people is not linear. It moves in bursts and often loops back, with periods of seeming to go backwards before going forward again.
Not all loss involves bereavement. Other losses that can be very distressing for children and young people include:
If your child is showing grief-like responses to one of these non-death losses, the framework in this guide largely applies. The work is to acknowledge that this is real loss, validate the response, and support the process of moving through it.
For many children, the death of a pet is their first significant experience of loss. It deserves to be taken seriously. A pet is often a central member of the child's daily emotional landscape, and grief at their death can be just as intense as grief for a person. For younger children especially, how a pet's death is talked about can be part of how they first come to understand death.
When a death is sudden, violent, or witnessed, what looks like grief can be complicated by trauma responses. Symptoms can include intrusive memories or images, nightmares, feeling constantly on edge, avoidance of reminders, and a sense of unreality.
The clinical distinction matters because trauma-shaped grief may not respond to grief support alone. The trauma and the grief often need attention together, and a suitably trained professional can help work out what needs to come first. Sometimes the trauma has to settle before the grief work can go deeper, and significant trauma symptoms may need a specialist assessment or treatment. If your child has been bereaved suddenly, violently, or as a witness, please flag this clearly to any professional you engage. The approach matters.
For many children, grief follows a recognisable pattern, though every child's path is different. Acute distress reduces over months. Functioning gradually returns. The child carries the loss but is not consumed by it. Grief does not disappear, but it integrates.
A subset of young people develop what clinicians now call Prolonged Grief Disorder: intense, persistent grief that lasts a long time and gets in the way of daily life. Prolonged Grief Disorder is a clinical diagnosis, based on a particular pattern of persistent grief and its effect on daily life, and only a qualified professional can make it, after a proper assessment.
Research on prolonged grief, mostly with adults, identifies risk factors including sudden or violent death, the type of relationship with the person who died, prior mental health difficulties, and a lack of social support after the loss.” Hilberdink et al., 2023, Global Mental Health
Prolonged grief in young people can ease with focused therapeutic support, so it is not something a young person simply has to live with.
Signs your child may need extra support can include:
These are prompts, not a checklist, and a young person can be struggling without showing all of them. If you are seeing this picture, professional support is worth seeking sooner rather than later. If there is any self-harm or suicidal thinking, do not wait. Contact your GP and ask for an urgent appointment, or call NHS 111, and call 999 or go to A&E if your child is in immediate danger.
Supporting a grieving child is one of the hardest things a parent can do. It’s harder when you’re also grieving, and harder still when you are also holding the practical pieces (the estate, the funeral, the conversations with school, your own grieving family) and trying to keep the household running.
Many parents describe a kind of double load: their own grief, and the worry of carrying their child's grief on top of it. You may find yourself trying to perform stability you do not feel. You may worry that you’re not crying enough, or are crying too much. You may have moments of fury at the dead person, at the surviving family, at yourself, at strangers in the supermarket. You may find that you and your child grieve completely differently, on completely different timelines, and that this is its own source of friction.
A few things that tend to help:
A few things that tend not to help:
Several things can help in the months and years after a loss.
Keep routines as steady as you can: Mealtimes, bedtimes, school. Predictability is grounding when so much else has shifted.
Tell the school: Some grieving children miss out on support because school doesn't know, or doesn't know how to respond. A short, factual conversation with the form tutor or pastoral lead, with agreed accommodations (permission to leave class quietly if needed, a named safe person, flexibility on deadlines), can make a real difference. Our post on speaking to school about your child's mental health covers how to approach these conversations.
Let them ask questions, repeatedly: Young children especially may ask the same questions again and again. Asking again and again is a common way for children to make sense of a loss.
Help them keep the person alive in memory: Photographs, stories, anniversaries, small rituals on important dates, talking about the person in normal conversation. Continuing bonds can be a healthy part of grief, not avoidance of it.
Let them grieve their own way: Some children make memory boxes, write letters, draw. Others may go quiet for long stretches and then need to talk all at once. Some don't want to talk about it at all and need the subject left alone.
Connect them with other bereaved children where possible: UK charities including Child Bereavement UK (which Winston's Wish is now part of) and Cruse Bereavement Support offer peer groups, helplines, and structured grief support specifically designed for children and young people. Many bereaved young people find it helps to meet another young person who has also been bereaved.
Look after yourself: You cannot pour from an empty cup. Your own grief support, peer connection, and rest are part of the family's recovery, not a distraction from it.
Many children, with support from family and school, move through grief without needing formal therapy. Consider professional support when:
With grief, there is no set timeline. Signals worth acting on include distress that stays intense rather than coming and going, or that is getting in the way of school, friendships, sleep or daily life.
A common worry is that counselling will force a child to talk about things they don't want to talk about. Grief counselling shouldn't do this. It creates a space, follows the child's lead, and gives them tools and language they can use as their grief evolves.
Skilled grief work in children and young people typically includes:
Grief support for children who have lost a parent is not a single technique. It blends helping a child understand grief, building skills to handle big feelings, processing the loss, keeping a continuing bond with the person who died, making meaning, and involving the people caring for them.
The three-level meta-analysis by Roest and colleagues of 99 studies on child and adolescent psychotherapy found that the therapeutic relationship is consistently associated with better outcomes.[8] For a grieving child, the experience of being seen and accepted by a calm adult outside the family can itself be an important part of the healing.
Vanessa Crutchlow, MBACP, a Finding Therapy counsellor with experience in supporting children and young people with bereavement and loss, shares how she works in her sessions:
"I've worked with children and young people through bereavement and loss for over 10 years, in schools, private practice, and charities. My specialist training includes Cruse Bereavement Care, Trauma-Informed Schools UK, and dedicated programmes in supporting children and families in grief. Over that time, I've learnt that each child's experience is unique, but what's always true is that grief needs to be seen, heard, and supported with compassion."
"Before meeting with a child, I speak with parents or carers to understand what has happened and how it's affected the family. This includes knowing who or what has been lost, how the child learned about it, and what language or beliefs are important for your family. I also want to know about your child's interests and strengths, so I can prepare ways to engage them gently from the very first session."
"The priority at the start is trust. Children don't open up to a stranger about their deepest feelings straight away, so I begin with activities or games that help them feel safe and comfortable. This also helps me understand what they're struggling with most, whether it's sadness, separation anxiety, anger, sleep problems, or something else. From there, we work together on what matters most to them."
"Finding Therapy's creative online platform is particularly helpful in grief work. It gives young people safe, varied ways to express themselves, through drawing, storytelling, music, timelines or even games. For some children, it feels easier to write a message to their loved one, create a memory box, or design a comic-strip story of their life before and after the loss. Others use metaphors like an "invisible string" that still connects them to the person they love."
"These creative approaches take the pressure off having to find the "right words" and allow feelings to come through in safe, manageable ways. The platform also provides grounding tools and soothing activities that children can return to between sessions."
"I work at the child or young person's pace. Sometimes we laugh about funny memories of the person who has died, other times we sit with the pain of missing them. I use gentle education around grief to reassure them that their feelings, however big or messy, are normal and won't always feel this overwhelming. Together we build coping strategies, find ways to remember the person they've lost, and explore how life has changed while recognising what remains the same."
"I also work closely with parents, and sometimes schools, so that a child feels consistently supported in all areas of their life. After difficult sessions, I let parents know that their child may need some extra time, comfort, or closeness."
"There's no set timetable for grief. Some children may benefit from just a few sessions, while others need longer support. Therapy gives them a safe space to process what has happened, but it also provides skills and reassurance they can carry forward in life. I always remind young people that they can come back to therapy if they need to, having that safety net can be deeply reassuring."
"If I had one message to parents it's that with support, many families find a way through this, even when that feels hard to imagine. Grief hurts because love runs so deep, and that love doesn't disappear. Your child will carry their loved one in their heart and memories forever, as a treasure no one can take away. A quote I often like to share with the young people I work with is 'when it rains, look for rainbows. When it's dark, look for stars.'"
Online therapy can be a particularly good fit for grief work. For many young people, the familiar home environment feels a more comfortable, less unfamiliar place for difficult conversations than a therapy room. Sessions can be paced around the child's energy. Creative work (drawing, memory-making, timeline activities) is well-supported by the interactive Finding Therapy platform.
For anxiety and depression in children and young people, research suggests therapy delivered through a screen can work about as well as meeting in person.[9] That research was not about grief specifically, so treat it as general reassurance about online therapy for young people rather than proof for this.
For young people who are not yet ready to talk about the loss directly, the option to step into therapy from their own bedroom, with their own comfort objects nearby, can make it easier to begin. Online counselling isn't right for every situation: where there is a significant risk to safety, a safeguarding concern, or a need for more intensive or specialist assessment, other support may be better.
Recovery from grief is not the same as forgetting, getting over it, or returning to the person you were before. A helpful way to think about it is integration: the loss becomes part of the young person's story rather than the dominant feature of it. The pain is still there. For most young people, it softens over time, becomes less acute, and is increasingly possible to carry. Progress is rarely steady, and anniversaries or new stages of life can bring the grief back for a while.
Continuing bonds, the ongoing relationship with the person who has died, can be healthy. This might mean keeping a connection through memories, conversation or small rituals, which can be a healthy part of grieving for some young people. Pressure to move on can lead a young person to hide their grief rather than work through it.
For some young people, grief that has been allowed, witnessed and supported can, in time, become a source of empathy and understanding.
If your child has been bereaved, it can help to remember that grief is a deeply human experience. Your child is loving someone, in the only way available to them now that the person is gone. For many young people, grief becomes less intense with time, support and patience, although it can still be felt and may come back at important moments.
At Finding Therapy, we have counsellors experienced in working with bereaved young people. If you'd like to talk to someone experienced in this, browse our directory of children's and young people's counsellors, or book a free consultation and you'll speak to our Head of Counselling, who can help with a recommendation.
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