“Daddy! Heaven!” Bryce gleefully exclaims most evenings when I put him to bed. He points to the ceiling with his big, innocent smile.

Some evenings I wonder if he thinks ceilings are called “heaven,” but most of me knows that isn’t true. When he was barely talking, he pointed to Brian’s portrait in our family room and said, “Dada” clear as day. Sometimes now he’ll point to family photos on the wall or on my computer screen and say, “Daddy! Mommy! Landon! Lexi! Bryce!”

The joy he exhibits when he sees those he loves, and who love him, is beautiful, whole and utterly crushing. His purity and his innocence alongside the heinous magnitude of what he has lost is incomprehensible. There are times I look at him and feel so desperately sad that he’s unaware of how much he has lost and how different his life is without Brian in it.

Today is Children’s Grief Awareness Day, an initiative of the Highmark Caring Place. Held annually the Thursday before Thanksgiving, the day recognizes children’s grief and aims to bring awareness to how children grieve and how we can best support them.

WATCH: Children’s Grief Awareness Day videos on The Caring Place’s YouTube channel.

We’ve been involved with The Caring Place since summer of 2023 and cannot speak highly enough of the staff, volunteers and program.

The Sobering Stats

“Grief brain” is well-documented among scientists, especially its effects among adults. Traumatic grief rewires the brain in a process called neuroplasticity. The prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortexes, which are the thinking and emotional regulation centers, respectively, are underactive. Meanwhile, the fear center—amygdala—of the brain is overactive. This puts us into an unsustainable survival response mode of “fight, flight or freeze.”

If traumatic grief can affect a fully developed brain so powerfully, what must it do to an immature, developing brain?

I’m still trying to learn how grief affects children long-term. No amount of reading will give me the answers I seek. Only time will. Time spent raising our children and seeing how they grow and how grief manifests itself, as it does every day with Landon in particular. Whereas Bryce smiles and points to Daddy in heaven each night, Landon likes to imagine and talk about what Daddy would have liked about our days. Not a night goes by that we don’t talk about Brian, our memories and how we imagine he would have interacted with us during our days.

Grief also looks different in children. Adults will often cry, retreat into themselves or exhibit other “normal” grief symptoms. But it’s arguably more complex in children. Grief is tears. Grief is anger. Grief is frustration. Grief is impatience. Grief is repeated conversations. Grief can even be laughter, joy, memory sharing and more. Kids have a limited capacity for big feelings all at once and they can cycle in and out of them very quickly. What you see on the surface isn’t necessarily a reflection of what’s going on underneath.

Their immature brains also reprocess memories as they mature and understand on new levels. I’ve seen this already in the 20 months since Brian died. Landon–ever the inquisitive child–asks a lot of hard questions and they’re getting deeper and harder as time progresses.

I believe their grief journey will be a lifelong one. Joanne Cacciatore’s wonderful book, Bearing the Unbearable, had a terrific quote that the load we carry doesn’t change throughout time; our capacity to carry it does. Landon and Bryce will always carry Brian’s death. My responsibility is to equip them to do so.

How We Can Help

A 2019 study indicates the younger a child is when a parent dies, the bigger negative impact it has on their lives. Further, children report it takes more than six years to “move forward” after a parent dies, yet more than half report waning support from family and friends within the first three months after a loss.

That 5+ year gap between “moving forward” and when support tapers is astounding. Bereaved children are more like to be expelled from school, repeat a grade, are less likely to be in gifted education programs and are more likely to have a disability. We must do better for the grieving children in our lives. Adults have an awesome and humbling responsibility to children to guide them through their lives and to tackle these mountains head-on.

Almost 60 percent of adults who lost a parent growing up report increased sadness and depression compared to adults who hadn’t lost a parent in their childhood. Grief has no finish line. There is no moment of “I’m all done being sad!” It will come and go in waves. Sometimes they’ll be gentle waves spaced far apart. Sometimes they’ll feel tsunami-like in intensity and leave us gasping for breath.

Last year I shared a list of how to help, which remains evergreen. This year, I reiterate much of that list.

• Spend time together. I cannot emphasize this enough. I know my kids thrive on individual attention, which can be very difficult for me to provide. Not only do I have to give twice as much attention as I did before, but I have twice as many responsibilities outside of parenting. You can see how the math doesn’t work out. Any parent in my situation will say the same. Help envelope our children in love and attention. Help them be kids. Help them feel secure.
• Follow through. This is related to spending time together. If you say you’re going to be there, be there. Many grieving children already grapple with insecurity and fear over losing more important people. It’s important to follow through and show up in the ways you tell them you will.
• Teach them. Try to imagine the same loss in your own life as a child, or if your children were in the same situation. What can you teach a grieving child in your life that their loved one might have taught them? What activity or experience might you do together? It by no means will fill that hole, but is nevertheless important.
• Learn from them. We spend so much time teaching children that it’s easy to forget how much we can learn from children. If you’re privileged enough to be the one a child opens up to, don’t listen with the intent to respond. Listen thoughtfully and carefully. Hear, respect and honor what they’re saying. Respond to what they’re actually saying. Listen long enough and you’ll learn so much from them.

Time will not heal children’s wounds, nor adults’ for that matter. It’s what we do with and for our children in the time we have that will lead to healing. Hard work, honest conversation and love will. Scars will linger that tell stories of their past, stories of their loved ones, and stories of their incredible capacity to grow and hopefully thrive amid the unthinkable in life.

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**Disclaimer: I am by no means a child or mental health expert. I’m merely a grieving parent parenting grieving children. Please always seek professional help if you and/or your children need it.