Children’s Grief Awareness Day – Call for Submissions!
/ Supporting a Griever : Isabelle Siegel
According to the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model, approximately 1 in 14 American children will experience a significant loss (e.g., that of a parent or sibling) during childhood. Nonetheless, it is often overlooked that children have the capacity to experience and understand the intense emotions of grief. This oversight renders children particularly vulnerable to feeling alone and helpless as they grieve. Children’s Grief Awareness Day seeks to increase awareness of the fact that children can and do grieve. In the words of Dr. Alan Wolfelt:
“Any child that is old enough to love is old enough to mourn.”
On November 19th, we strive to promote recognition of the needs of grieving children. Providing support for grieving children is critical, as research suggests that ignoring children’s grief has massive repercussions for their psychological and physical health.
Children and teens need to know that their perspectives are valued. This year, we want to honor the stories of individual grieving children by providing them with a platform to be heard.
We are collecting anonymous audio submissions from children and teens who have experienced grief. If you are under 13, you cannot participate (based on federal law) without getting permission from your parent/caregiver and having your parent or caregiver submit on your behalf.
13-18 Year Olds
If you are 13-18 and have experienced the death of someone you love recently or when you were younger, you can record an anonymous audio submission below responding to the following question:
“What do you want adults to know about grief?”
To submit your audio recording, please complete the form below with your email address and age (your email address will NOT be shared or used for any purpose other than matching your age with your recording). Then click the orange button to record, enter your email again, and then you are all set! Remember, these are anonymous so please don’t share your name in your audio recording.
Children Under 13
We would love to hear from children under 13, but you do need a parent or caregiver’s permission to participate in this project. To submit for this project, a parent or caregiver will need to send the audio recording to us by email and sign a consent form allowing us to use it. Parents/caregivers should email us at submit@whatsyourgrief.com to request the permission form.
All audio files should be 90 seconds or less and should NOT include names!
Subscribe.
We wrote a book!
After writing online articles for What’s Your Grief
for over a decade, we finally wrote a tangible,
real-life book!
What’s Your Grief? Lists to Help you Through Any Loss is for people experiencing any type of loss. This book discusses some of the most common grief experiences and breaks down psychological concepts to help you understand your thoughts and emotions. It also shares useful coping tools, and helps the reader reflect on their unique relationship with grief and loss.
You can find What’s Your Grief? Lists to Help you Through Any Loss wherever you buy books:
Roxanne December 9, 2020 at 6:51 pm
I see a lot of posts and blogs about how to deal with teens in grief or how they probably will react to grief and such and such, but I can’t seem to find one ABOUT teens experiencing grief FOR teens experiencing grief. It’s always like directed towards parents or feels almost patronizing at times– either mashing us together with adults or younger children. I want to know if anyone here can help me find if there’s any blogs or articles that specifically address teen loss and can help tell me why it’s so much harder to do my school work and write essays or pick up my instrument and stuff. I just feel like, overlooked or unseen over here. Please, thank you, and sorry.
IsabelleS December 11, 2020 at 10:22 am
Roxanne, I understand how frustrating it must be to feel so overlooked and unseen. You’re right… Teens experiencing grief are unique and deserve their own attention. I’m so sorry you have to go through this. I recommend you check out this article: https://whatsyourgrief.com/childrens-grief-awareness-day-64/ You are not alone.