Loss, Grief and Child Development
Sitting at the dinner table one night, talking about nothing in particular and our then 7 year old, Oliver, said, “Opa is dead, y’know.” True fact, my father whom we called Opa, I guess STILL call Opa, died September 30, 2019. It was almost 2 years since he had passed and this thought popped into Oliver’s head, at dinner time, without the topic really being broached. We recently lost our dog of 15 years, Molly. Oliver is 8 and Liam is 12 and Molly is the first dog they’ve known at home and we have been through a lot with her. Tumors, dental surgery, heart murmurs and old age have been issues that the boys have witnessed and dealt with as she grew older. Even on her last day, Oliver said goodbye and Liam came with us to the procedure. Though both of them were champs, I know they have internalized the event and Oliver has since mentioned he wished Molly didn’t have to die or that she was still with us.
These events reaffirm what my research from ten years ago showed - children are resilient, but resilience doesn’t mean not dealing with, or struggling with, trauma and life events. Children remember them, memories are always with them and, due in large part to Piaget’s theory of equilibration, one never knows how the child processed the event so one never really knows when a thought might pop up, and out.
Let me briefly explain equilibration. Piaget theorized that humans throughout their lives receive input and need to incorporate the information through a process called, “equilibration.” A person can “assimilate” the information by adding it to a set of information, or schema, they have previously created. One example is when a young child has a dog for a pet. They see the four legs, the hair, the tail and they label it, “dog” because the people around her call it a dog. Then they go to a neighbor’s house and she sees a cat - same fur, same four legs, same tail - and calls it a dog in a process often referred to as generalization. One will generalize a rule they may have previously known to a new stimulus. You can hear adults do it with the conjugation of new words. But the dog-cat scenario, that is assimilation.
Accommodation on the other hand, is changing the schema, or worldview, to incorporate new information/stimulus. When she sees the cat, after knowing “dog”, and calls it a dog - someone around her corrects her by calling the cat, a cat. Now she has a new category for something with fur, and a tail, and four legs. She will continue - and may even be BAFFLED by someone referring to a tiger as a big cat. WHAT?!?!?!
The process of equilibration continues throughout the life span, especially if you step out of the familiar and try new things. In the event you do try new things, your brain has to continually create and modify categories to fit the great big world. OR, one can stay in their bubble and fight against anything new or anything that doesn’t fit their schema. It is comfortable for the person in that space - unless they try to interact with the bigger world then it could possibly be the birthplace of conflict.
So, when trauma impacts a child, they equilibrate that experience into their schema - it becomes part of the way they see the world. Desensitization to, say, gunshots, is an excellent and dramatic example. Children hear, and experience, gunshots on a regular basis and they become desensitized to the sounds and the reactions [there are physiological effects but that is for another essay]. They incorporate the sounds into a schema and create categories and how to respond to it. Then, and it is often diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder, generalization leads the person to respond to a similar sound in the similar way.
All of this information leads me to discuss how people deal with loss and the reason I am doing this is because in a matter of three years I have lost my father and my dog of fifteen, almost sixteen, years. Additionally, my sons have lost an Opa and the only pet they have known for all of their lives. Those events have led me to write an essay on how children deal with loss, how it manifested in my home, and what part equilibration played in the course of dealing with the losses.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2018 published a statement about how children deal with loss and grief . In it, they discuss that children between 5 and 9 grasp death and dying in a generally healthy, realistic way. Younger children often do not recognize the permanence of death as they have likely created a schema about things dying from cartoons and the dead characters often come back to life in the next episode or the same one in which they died.
What children seemingly do not do is forget.
Remember that Oliver made the statement about his Opa two years after his funeral that Oliver attended. He remembers the day, the feelings, other people’s feelings, and he has had the opportunity to talk about them. Children do not repress their memories - they become a part of their schema, their worldview. The people in their surroundings can impose a practice of oppressing memories and the accompanying reactions, but children, left to their own devices, will share and express their feelings. Psychoanalysis is based on opening those doors of oppression and sneaking through the obstacles of repression. Adults in their environment, as the AACAP found, are often the ones who are inaccessible due to their own grief responses- also likely to be the product of how THEY were allowed to deal with trauma. It is imperative that adults are accessible to the child and ready to actively listen to their concerns.
My consistent thread throughout these website essays is that children do not leave their stresses outside of any door whether it be the bedroom door, the classroom door or the gate to the playing field. Feelings of stress, and trauma related to a whole host of traumatic or even impactful events in their lives become part of their tapestry and allowing for those feelings and listening to the person is vital. Teachers, parents and caregivers all need to be prepared to help children learn while they are carrying the weight of life experience and in some cases, trauma.
Sitting at the dinner table one night, talking about nothing in particular and our then 7 year old, Oliver, said, “Opa is dead, y’know.” True fact, my father whom we called Opa, I guess STILL call Opa, died September 30, 2019. It was almost 2 years since he had passed and this thought popped into Oliver’s head, at dinner time, without the topic really being broached. We recently lost our dog of 15 years, Molly. Oliver is 8 and Liam is 12 and Molly is the first dog they’ve known at home and we have been through a lot with her. Tumors, dental surgery, heart murmurs and old age have been issues that the boys have witnessed and dealt with as she grew older. Even on her last day, Oliver said goodbye and Liam came with us to the procedure. Though both of them were champs, I know they have internalized the event and Oliver has since mentioned he wished Molly didn’t have to die or that she was still with us.
These events reaffirm what my research from ten years ago showed - children are resilient, but resilience doesn’t mean not dealing with, or struggling with, trauma and life events. Children remember them, memories are always with them and, due in large part to Piaget’s theory of equilibration, one never knows how the child processed the event so one never really knows when a thought might pop up, and out.
Let me briefly explain equilibration. Piaget theorized that humans throughout their lives receive input and need to incorporate the information through a process called, “equilibration.” A person can “assimilate” the information by adding it to a set of information, or schema, they have previously created. One example is when a young child has a dog for a pet. They see the four legs, the hair, the tail and they label it, “dog” because the people around her call it a dog. Then they go to a neighbor’s house and she sees a cat - same fur, same four legs, same tail - and calls it a dog in a process often referred to as generalization. One will generalize a rule they may have previously known to a new stimulus. You can hear adults do it with the conjugation of new words. But the dog-cat scenario, that is assimilation.
Accommodation on the other hand, is changing the schema, or worldview, to incorporate new information/stimulus. When she sees the cat, after knowing “dog”, and calls it a dog - someone around her corrects her by calling the cat, a cat. Now she has a new category for something with fur, and a tail, and four legs. She will continue - and may even be BAFFLED by someone referring to a tiger as a big cat. WHAT?!?!?!
The process of equilibration continues throughout the life span, especially if you step out of the familiar and try new things. In the event you do try new things, your brain has to continually create and modify categories to fit the great big world. OR, one can stay in their bubble and fight against anything new or anything that doesn’t fit their schema. It is comfortable for the person in that space - unless they try to interact with the bigger world then it could possibly be the birthplace of conflict.
So, when trauma impacts a child, they equilibrate that experience into their schema - it becomes part of the way they see the world. Desensitization to, say, gunshots, is an excellent and dramatic example. Children hear, and experience, gunshots on a regular basis and they become desensitized to the sounds and the reactions [there are physiological effects but that is for another essay]. They incorporate the sounds into a schema and create categories and how to respond to it. Then, and it is often diagnosed as post traumatic stress disorder, generalization leads the person to respond to a similar sound in the similar way.
All of this information leads me to discuss how people deal with loss and the reason I am doing this is because in a matter of three years I have lost my father and my dog of fifteen, almost sixteen, years. Additionally, my sons have lost an Opa and the only pet they have known for all of their lives. Those events have led me to write an essay on how children deal with loss, how it manifested in my home, and what part equilibration played in the course of dealing with the losses.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2018 published a statement about how children deal with loss and grief . In it, they discuss that children between 5 and 9 grasp death and dying in a generally healthy, realistic way. Younger children often do not recognize the permanence of death as they have likely created a schema about things dying from cartoons and the dead characters often come back to life in the next episode or the same one in which they died.
What children seemingly do not do is forget.
Remember that Oliver made the statement about his Opa two years after his funeral that Oliver attended. He remembers the day, the feelings, other people’s feelings, and he has had the opportunity to talk about them. Children do not repress their memories - they become a part of their schema, their worldview. The people in their surroundings can impose a practice of oppressing memories and the accompanying reactions, but children, left to their own devices, will share and express their feelings. Psychoanalysis is based on opening those doors of oppression and sneaking through the obstacles of repression. Adults in their environment, as the AACAP found, are often the ones who are inaccessible due to their own grief responses- also likely to be the product of how THEY were allowed to deal with trauma. It is imperative that adults are accessible to the child and ready to actively listen to their concerns.
My consistent thread throughout these website essays is that children do not leave their stresses outside of any door whether it be the bedroom door, the classroom door or the gate to the playing field. Feelings of stress, and trauma related to a whole host of traumatic or even impactful events in their lives become part of their tapestry and allowing for those feelings and listening to the person is vital. Teachers, parents and caregivers all need to be prepared to help children learn while they are carrying the weight of life experience and in some cases, trauma.