Supporting Children After a Loved One Dies: A Trauma-Informed Healing Resource
The reality of loss can arrive without warning. It might come as an unexpected late-night call, a staggering text, or a startling knock on your front door from a relative, social worker, or police officer. You are informed that a significant person in your child’s life—a birth parent, a beloved sibling, an extended family member, a teacher, a mentor, or a previous caregiver—has died.
As a parent or caregiver, you suddenly find yourself navigating two powerful emotional grief and loss trauma triggers: your own shock and grief, and the profound, often confusing, complex, and immense sorrow of the child you love.
For a child who has already experienced significant loss and trauma, this new death can shake the foundations of their world, triggering past emotional pains, prior losses, and an unnerving fear and uncertainty of future abandonment.
The key concept you need to be aware of is that the loss of a loved one can reactivate past trauma. This emotional roller coaster leads to complex grief—a complicated, disrupted healing process, where the current sadness immediately links to all their past, unresolved emotional wounds.
This resource is designed to help you support your child through this complex loss by providing practical, trauma-informed healing resources.
