It's Okay to Cry: A Parent's Guide to Helping Children Through the Losses of Life - Softcover

Wright, H. Norman

 
9781578567607: It's Okay to Cry: A Parent's Guide to Helping Children Through the Losses of Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1578567602 ISBN 13: 9781578567607
Verlag: Waterbrook Press (A Division of Random House Inc), 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Restoring Your Child to Emotional Health

When something unexpected, disappointing, or traumatic occurs, children feel a very real sense of loss. Parents or others who care need to tell them,

It’s Okay to Cry.

Children may respond to loss with fear or with anger. Most likely they are confused. They have questions they want and need answered. This workbook, with excerpts from the book It’s Okay to Cry, gives parents a hands-on, interactive tool for dealing with various losses in their children’s lives.

The workbook includes exercises, charts, and illustrations to assist children in identifying feelings and grieving properly. Separate sections of the workbook are suitable for younger children, elementary-age children, and pre-teens. Drawing pages, reflective exercises, and other aids help children process loss and move toward full emotional healing and recovery.

This loss recovery workbook will help anyone helping a child apply the practical advice from well-known and respected author H. Norman Wright. His sympathetic and reassuring approach gives parents and children the comfort and hope they seek.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

H. Norman Wright is a licensed marriage, family, and child therapist and a certified trauma specialist. In private counseling practice for over 30 years, Dr. Wright has also authored more than 70 books.

Aus dem Klappentext

Restoring Your Child to Emotional Health

When something unexpected, disappointing, or traumatic occurs, children feel a very real sense of loss. Parents or others who care need to tell them,

It s Okay to Cry.

Children may respond to loss with fear or with anger. Most likely they are confused. They have questions they want and need answered. This workbook, with excerpts from the book It s Okay to Cry, gives parents a hands-on, interactive tool for dealing with various losses in their children s lives.

The workbook includes exercises, charts, and illustrations to assist children in identifying feelings and grieving properly. Separate sections of the workbook are suitable for younger children, elementary-age children, and pre-teens. Drawing pages, reflective exercises, and other aids help children process loss and move toward full emotional healing and recovery.

This loss recovery workbook will help anyone helping a child apply the practical advice from well-known and respected author H. Norman Wright. His sympathetic and reassuring approach gives parents and children the comfort and hope they seek.

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Introduction

When Loss Comes Calling

“I got an empty spot in my tummy. Food doesn’t fill it up.”
–Susan, age 4

“There’s a big hurt in my insides.”
–Geniene, age 3

“I don’t feel nothing. And I don’t want to.”
–Jimmy, age 8

“I don’t like to play anymore. I have bad thoughts.”
–Tom, age 6

“My food doesn’t taste good. I don’t like to eat.”
–Sonya, age 6

“I’m sad all the time. It’s like I don’t live in my house anymore, but I do.”
–Phil, age 7

All of these children have experienced a loss. The particular missing entity may not seem like much of a loss to an adult. But in the life of each child, it was a momentous event. For a child, grief is always about losing something
100 percent; present or future, it’s completely taken away.

Will you be able to help a child–your child–through that kind of loss? I know you want to. And I believe you’ll have the skills to do it after reading this book. But it won’t be easy, primarily because it’s not an easy thing to move into our painful feelings rather than flee them. In fact, just talking about the topic raises our anxiety levels significantly. I recall several parents discussing their difficulties in talking about death, not just with children, but with anyone. Listen to their comments:

“It makes me anxious. I’d rather avoid it. And I don’t want to make
others anxious or sad either.”

“When I talk about it, I start to cry. I don’t like that. Crying can make
others cry, and then I feel responsible as well.”

“You know, as I think about it, why should any of us know what to say
about death? No one I know talks about it.”

“I don’t want my children to get all morbid. I want them to think
about life, not death.”

One of our difficulties resides in the fact that children today are sheltered from the normal transitions of life. Death is a stranger, an intruder, not a normal part of living as it was a century or two ago. It used to be that several generations lived in the same house or at least close by. The youngest children learned about birth, illness, old age, and death because these things all happened in their home.

Other generations included children who saw their siblings, cousins, and friends die from diseases such as diphtheria, smallpox, polio, and even the flu. They were around their grandparents so much that they watched them age day by day–and perhaps helped in their care until they died.

And everyone in the family mourned. Together.

Often the local pastor conducted the viewing and funeral in the home. If the body was there for a viewing, it probably stayed overnight. Can you imagine your child (or even yourself, for that matter) sleeping in the same house with a dead body? What used to be so normal would probably be considered “dysfunctional” today.
Many children have never seen chicks born, or puppies or kittens, not to mention a horse or calf. They don’t know that some animals are stillborn and never make it. They eat their chicken, turkey, and beef, giving no thought to the fact that something had to die.

For other generations, though, death was as much a part of their existence as life. Death happened all around them, so a child grew into the knowledge of death in his own way and his own time. There was less mystery about it.
Yet today our children have become a grief-free generation. We’d prefer to avoid mourning.1

In this kind of culture, then, what happens when you or your spouse has an accident, loses a job, suffers a chronic illness, or goes back to school? It’s a loss for everyone, including your child. But too often we focus on the adult who is doing the losing or changing. In all the hustle to repair the damage, the youngster stands sad eyed, waiting to be noticed.

And then there’s the possibility of a death in the family. None of us wants to believe this will happen until we as parents move into our seventies or eighties and all the children are grown and have families of their own. Sure, grandparents and great uncles and aunts die; that’s to be expected.

But moms, dads, and children do regularly die “before their time.” And then the losses multiply, especially for children. And the roles and rules shift dramatically. We’ll talk about these things extensively in the chapters ahead. For example, if someone from the immediate family is missing, every family member needs to compensate for that vacancy, including the children:

• If a mother dies, it’s the loss of the most active caregiver, the keeper of memories, the emotional teacher and guide. Children say:

“I don’t want to think about my mother. It hurts too much to think she won’t be around anymore.”

“I got in a fight at school when my friend called me an orphan. I was mad. Mad because he was kinda right. I feel like one sometimes.”

“I dreamed that when I got home from school, my dog was there. When I woke up, I called his name, but he didn’t come. I called Mom’s name, but she didn’t come either!”

• If a father dies, it usually means the loss of the major financial contributor as well as the family’s “coach.” One man was talking to an eight-year-old about the death of his father. The boy, telling us how much he had lost, said:

“Let me play the piano for you. I know how to play Mozart. My father liked that I could do that. Sometimes he sat with me and turned the pages for me. He would even hum along. He won’t do that anymore or hear me again. I like to read. Dad taught me. I’m learning a computer. Dad was real good on computers. But he can’t help me.”

• If a sibling dies, a child loses out on being the older sibling who teaches or the younger one who is taught:

“My sister took care of me when I came home. Now the house is empty.”

“We would play music together. I played the piano, and he played the trumpet. Now it just sits in the case. I can hear the sound in my head, but it’s just not the same.”

In your child’s mind, memories of whomever he lost come to the forefront. Some recollections may be good, and some may be bad. The child remembers the sound of his dad’s voice when he talked or sang, and that is comforting. But it’s also painful, since he won’t hear those sounds again. Other children will only recall the shouting or the spankings or maybe only the silence of a dad who was always at work anyway.

Sadly, the good memories will begin to fade, and eventually some will be lost forever. The child won’t be able to resurrect them. And this is only one of the additional woundings that come packaged with the initial loss.


What’s the Basic Approach with Children?

Convinced that loss profoundly affects our children in these ways, we parents determine to help them. But how? It has to do with assisting them in the hard work of grieving. If I could sum up the theme of this book in one statement, I’d say: Grieving our losses is essential to our ongoing emotional health, whether we’re adults or children. I’ll let grief-counseling expert J. William Worden expand on this:

“Is mourning necessary?” I would have to answer this question with a definite, “Yes!” After one sustains a loss, there are certain tasks of mourning that must be...

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Verlag
Waterbrook Press (A Division of Random House Inc)
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1578567602
ISBN 13 
9781578567607
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
133
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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