At Hope for HIE, we hold our grieving families close to our hearts every single day. This November, in recognition of Children’s Grief Awareness Month, we want to remind you that you are never alone.
Grief can feel overwhelming for anyone, but for children, it often brings unique challenges in understanding and expression. Providing compassionate, developmentally appropriate support is key to helping them navigate these difficult emotions.
With guidance from Annie Gunning, our Certified Child Life Specialist and Certified Grief Counselor, we are here to help families create safe spaces where children can process loss, find comfort, and begin healing.
Grief responses in children are wide-ranging, varied, and unique to each individual situation. Please use these suggestions as a general guide when supporting the grieving children in your life.
When the death of a sibling occurs, children may grieve in private as to not upset others grieving the loss, thus making their grief complicated and difficult to understand (Akard et al., 2019). Research has found that expressive therapeutic activities (e.g. art, music, and play) can help adults understand children’s grief by further examining how grieving children may not be able to use words to express how they are feeling. Therefore, using both verbal and non-verbal therapeutic activities can help children express and understand their grief in creative and engaging ways (Stutey et al., 2016).
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Books can be a comforting way to help kids understand and talk about the big feelings that come with illness and loss. Stories give children a safe space to explore emotions, learn about what’s happening, and realize they’re not alone. Through familiar characters and gentle stories, books can help spark conversations, explain tough topics, and build strength.
Hope offers a range of resources to support, honor, and remember loss.
Annie Gunning, our on-staff Certified Child Life Specialist and Grief Counselor, is trained to provide coping strategies and suggestions for making memories through the bereavement and grief journey for the whole family—parents, siblings, and extended relatives.
We are able to connect you to resources worldwide, tapping into additional individualized and local programs to support your whole family along the way.
The HIE Loss Support Group is a worldwide peer support network designated for parents who have lost a child to HIE to express their feelings, support one another, and share their stories.
Hope's Peer Support Mentor program matches up families new to HIE loss with experienced, compassionate, trauma-trained peer parent leaders who provide emotional peer support to families through a 1:1 or on-call mentorship experience.
Led by Hope for HIE’s social worker, HIE loss families come together through a video support group that takes place on the second Thursday of every month to find community and discuss their journey with others.
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Jen Schaefer, our on-staff social worker, provides families with a compassionate and caring starting point by connecting them to a range of resources for bereavement, grief, and loss.