Children handle grief differently from adults, and from each other, experts say

By Jennifer Fernandez

When Max Binker was 10 years old, he woke up on a spring day in 2017 to a heartbreaking reality. His father had died suddenly, in the middle of the night.

Max and his older brother Mason, who was 13 ½ at the time, went to therapy to help them deal with their grief. Their mother, Marla Binker, also sent the boys several times to Comfort Zone Camp, a weekend camp that works with children who have lost a loved one.

Max said therapy didn’t really help him, probably because he wasn’t ready for it then. He doesn’t remember the first camp — a lot of what happened around that time is still a blur, he said. He said he already had difficulty communicating, and he felt lonely after the death of his father, noted statehouse journalist Mark Binker. But he said the second Comfort Zone Camp that he attended helped a lot. 

“One of the big things for me was like, even if it was a two-day experience, I was meeting all of these other people who had a similar experience,” he said. “I never talked to any of them again, but that was a very important thing for me to feel less lonely.”

Child grief

An estimated 6.3 million U.S. children will lose a parent or sibling by age 18, according to the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model. The model, which aggregates population and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was created by  Judi’s House/JAG Institute, a research-based nonprofit in Colorado that is dedicated to supporting grieving children. 

More than 1,000 U.S. children lost a parent or sibling every day in 2022, according to the organization’s estimate. That same year, 40 North Carolina children experienced the death of a parent or sibling every day.

Children handle grief differently from adults, and from each other, experts say. Some of that is due to their age, their capacity to understand what has happened, and their ability to communicate how they are feeling, said Mary Wise-Kriplani, a licensed clinical social worker and doctoral researcher at the Durham-based Center for Child and Family Health. She specializes in childhood bereavement.

“It takes many years to understand that death is inevitable, that it’s permanent,” she said.

Camps offer healing

In July, Hospice of Davidson County launched Camp Comfort, a series of day camps geared toward elementary, middle and high school age children who have lost a loved one. The idea was to provide opportunities to learn from hospice professionals in a supportive environment, and a chance to hear from peers who have experienced grief and loss, organizers said when announcing the new program.

A national program has been offering camps in the state for much longer.

Comfort Zone Camp has held camps in Greensboro, Wake Forest and Charlotte for several years. The nonprofit held its first camp in Richmond, Virginia, in 1999. After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Comfort Zone Camp added special sessions for children who lost someone in the terrorist attacks.

Katie Pereira, the North Carolina organizer for Comfort Zone Camp, attended one of the organization’s camps after her father died at the World Trade Center.

“It was sudden and traumatic. It was public, and visual to the whole entire world,” she said. “So it’s something that I really struggled with, because I had a hard time being able to just, you know, grieve my dad as my dad and not ‘my dad who died on 9/11.’”

She attended as a camper from age 7 to 15 and then continued as a junior counselor and later as a “big buddy” volunteer when she was in college. She began working for the organization full time four years ago.

“I wanted to be able to give back to the community in some way, just because of all the help that I received from Comfort Zone Camp growing up,” Pereira said. “It truly was the light for me, and exactly what I needed for my grief journey.”

Age matters

Overall, one in 19 N.C. children have lost a parent or sibling by the age of 18. 

That’s worse than the national picture — one in 23 children grieving the loss of a sibling or parent by the time they are 18 years old.

After the death of a loved one, very young children may think the person just doesn’t want to come back, Wise-Kriplani said. As children get to around 7 or 8 years old, they learn how to depersonalize death, which can help with the grieving process, she explained.

For adolescents, the response to death is more existential. “What’s the purpose of my life without this person?” “What’s the significance of getting straight As, if my mom’s not here to say that that’s a really great thing?”

Children might have emotional outbursts, Pereira explained. Or they might struggle to even share what they are feeling, especially for younger children.

“It can be really hard to be able to communicate what you’re feeling because you don’t have the vocabulary, you don’t have the words to actually describe what’s going on,” she said.

Children, especially really young children, will often seesaw between grief and typical childhood antics.

“We often talk about how little kids have such short attention spans. And it’s the same with emotions for little kids,” Wise-Kriplani said. “In the context of grief, they have these really short sadness spans. And that can be very confusing to surviving caregivers and adults.” 

She said it’s not uncommon, especially for really young children, to express sadness one moment, then with a snap of the fingers shift and be like, “Oh, I want a popsicle.”

Wise-Kriplani said it can be difficult for the caregiver who is also grieving when a child keeps asking where the loved one is or when they’ll be coming back.

The nature of the relationship with the person who died and the way they died can also affect the grieving process.

For example, a child who sees a parent die may suffer from trauma symptoms. That can sometimes interfere with someone’s ability to “adaptively grieve,” which Wise-Kriplani described as grieving “in a way that helps keep them connected to other people who will support them through their loss.”

A ‘fun and safe’ space

Max Binker also found help with his grief at Comfort Zone Camp.

He and his older brother, Mason, had been going to YMCA Camp Kanata in Wake Forest and returned there the summer after their father died. The camp director told their mother about Comfort Zone Camp, which was held at the Camp Kanata site.

Marla Binker said the camp really helped her sons.

“What they told me is that they felt like they weren’t alone anymore, because at school and among their friends, nobody had had that experience” of losing a parent, she said. “That really helped them feel more normal.”

Grief camps also allow children a space where they don’t feel like they have to explain things delicately to their peers, Wise-Kriplani said. They don’t have to tiptoe around the topic for fear of upsetting other kids.

The camp is designed to provide a fun and safe place for grieving children, Pereira said.

“Our goal is to be able to give them a safe space where they can be heard. (Where) they can be supported. And they can also be in a community of people who know what it’s like to lose someone as a grieving child,” Pereira said.

The Binker boys attended the camp several times.

“We did a lot of figuring out how we actually felt, which has always been a little bit of a problem for me,” Max said. “Especially at that point, I was doing my best to ignore the world. Having that direct confrontation was good.”

Kids just want to feel like a kid again, Pereira said.

“And when you lose somebody, it can be really hard to get back to that without feeling judged for wanting to be a kid,” she said. “I personally felt that way. You know, as a kid, you want to have fun, you want to play with your friends, you want to go to school, you want to be normal, you want to feel normal.”

Helping grieving children

Pereira said there’s no timetable for grief. And everyone grieves differently.

“I think our society as a whole likes to think that after a certain amount of time, you should just be over a death. That is not how it works. It is an ongoing loss,” she said.

“As you grow through your grief, especially in children … every year that passes without the person that died, you’re grieving something else. You’re grieving what could have been. You’re grieving the memories that you could have made with the person that died. You’re grieving the life that you had before the person passed away. And you’re also grieving your new normal.”

That’s how Max Binker, now 17, described his grief over the years since his father’s death at age 43 from undiagnosed heart disease.

“For me, grief has always been something that has come and gone and hasn’t ever stopped,” Max said. 

“It wasn’t just my dad dying at that one moment,” he added. “There were thousands of other moments that he should have been there, and sometimes those moments hit harder.”

Marla Binker said she also went to one camp that was geared toward parents through Comfort Zone Camp. The goal was to help parents with their grief, but also to learn coping mechanisms that they could use to help their family heal.

She encouraged parents dealing with a family death to get the help they need.

“It’s a lot to do on your own when you are also grieving,” she said.

She also said parents should let grieving children express themselves.

“Don’t try to change the fact that they’re hurting,” Marla Binker said. “You’ve just got to let them hurt. You don’t want them to be afraid to tell you when they feel bad.”

The same goes for kids, Max said. Don’t be afraid to talk with other people about what happened or be afraid you’re going to make other people uncomfortable, he said.

Wise-Kriplani said children, teenagers included, respond really well to invitations to ask questions. Let them know they’re “welcome to ask, to think, to feel, to remember,” she said. “Keep inviting gently and without pressure.”

Marla Binker made sure to continue to talk to the boys about their father.

“They need to talk about him. They still ask questions,” she said. “They need to know about him.”

Wise-Kriplani said parents shouldn’t overlook getting professional help for even very young children. She said there’s this myth that little children won’t remember the death of a loved one so it doesn’t matter. 

Research, longitudinal studies and interviews with adults show that adults who lost a parent in their early childhood, and for whom they have no active memories, “will still say that that was the most significantly hard experience of their life,” she said.

“Even if we forget what someone looks like, their relationship matters,” she said. “It matters, even if we … lose the memories, even if we’re … too young to retain the sound of their voice in our head.”

Healing is a process

After her husband’s death, Marla Binker began some new traditions to share with her sons. She started buying a nutcracker every year for Christmas for her and Max.

Christmas was especially hard, she said. Since she’s Jewish, that was her husband’s special time. He was in charge of putting up the tree and decorations.

“Eventually, I decided that having Christmas at home was too hard overall, so we started taking vacations,” she said. Last year was New Mexico: They didn’t know anyone there, it was just a new place to explore and to create memories together.

“It was really important to me to show my kids that we could still have fun and still do special things and remember him, and our life wasn’t over,” she said.

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