Life & Loss: A Guide To Help Grieving Children. Second Edition.

Because children experience grief in a variety of contexts, adults need a guide through the maze of thoughts and feelings that loss evokes for themselves and their children. This guide seeks to empower parents, educators, clergy, and health care professionals to handle children's loss and grief issues in an informed, open, and loving way, reducing the fear and denial often associated with these topics. The text is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 1 provides loss and grief statistics leading into the 21st century and explores the categories of childhood losses, offering suggestions on how to help. Chapter 2 explores the myths of 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 or in school are presented in chapter 4. Chapter 5 presents a story that provides an answer to the question of what to say when a child wants to say goodbye to a dying person. Intended especially for educators, chapter 6 describes the challenges that they and their students face daily. Chapter 7 presents a model for a community grief team, encompassing issues on parent education, advocacy in schools, child education, professional training, and multicultural considerations. Lists of national resources and a general list of community resources for caregivers are included in chapter 8. Chapter 9 concludes with annotations of books for adults and children, videos, manuals, CD-ROM, guides and curricula. Web sites for families and professionals about grief and loss have also been included. This second edition of "Life and Loss" seeks to create a framework for children's griefwork in the new millennium with a large number of updated resources. (Contains 46 references.) (GCP)