Life & Loss: A Guide To Help Grieving Children.

Since children experience many losses, adults need a guide through the maze of thoughts and feelings that loss evokes for themselves and their children. This guide is intended to help parents, educators, clergy, and health care professionals handle children's loss and grief issues in an informed, open, and loving way, and to reduce the fear and denial often associated with loss. The text is divided into eight chapters. To set the stage, chapter 1 provides loss and grief statistics for the 1990s and discusses categories of childhood losses, offering suggestions on how to help. Chapter 2 explores the myths surrounding loss and grief with which adults have been raised and chapter 3 explains the four psychological tasks of grief, including the child's developmental understanding from birth to adolescence. Grief resolution techniques that can be used at home, in school, or on the playground are presented in chapter 4. In chapter 5, a story that elaborates what to say and do when a child wants to say goodbye to a dying person is presented. Chapter 6 is intended for educators and chapter 7 contains a list of national resources. The last chapter offers annotations of around 200 titles of further resource material. Includes an index. (RJM)