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Guiding Little Hearts Through Big Losses: Age-by-Age Scripts, Honest Conversations, and Therapeutic Activities to Help Grieving Children Ages 3-12 Hea
Paperback
General EducationGeneral ParentingSelf-Help
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 136
Weight: 0.42
Height: 0.29 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Someone has died. A child is looking at you, waiting for you to say something - and every word you can think of feels wrong.
You want to soften it. He's sleeping. We lost her. She went away. Those phrases are meant kindly. They are also the reason so many grieving children become frightened of bedtime, keep waiting for someone who is never coming home, or decide quietly that the death was their fault.
This book gives you the actual words.
Inside you will find:- 12 word-for-word scripts for the questions children really ask - Is it my fault? Did it hurt? Are you going to die too? Will I forget what they looked like? What do I say when people at school ask? Each one in two versions: one for younger children, one for older.
- An age-by-age map of how children aged 3 to 12 understand death - why a four-year-old asks when Daddy is coming home, why a seven-year-old wants to know what happens to a body, and why a ten-year-old says I'm fine and means nothing of the kind.
- How to explain any cause of death - illness, old age, an accident - without leaving a child terrified of their own sore throat.
- Therapeutic activities: memory boxes, drawing prompts, letters, and play-based tools for children who cannot say it out loud.
- Funerals, school, and siblings - how to prepare a child for a service, what to ask their teacher for, and how to protect the older child who has quietly appointed themselves the strong one.
- 8 printable tools, including a quick-reference script card, a grief observation checklist, and a one-page guide you can photocopy and hand to your child's school.
- 15 Try This Tonight actions - every chapter ends with one thing you can finish in under twenty minutes.
This is not a book about the stages of grief. It is a practical, unflinching guide to the week you are actually in: what to say in the first conversation, what to do when the questions arrive at eleven o'clock at night, and how to tell ordinary grief from the kind that needs a professional's help.
It also tells you the truth about the parts nobody warns you about - that children grieve in bursts and then go back to playing, that month five is often harder than month one, and that you will get some of this wrong and it will not break them.
You do not have to have all the answers to help a child heal. You only need to stay in the room and tell the truth.
Scroll up and add it to your cart to start the conversation your child is already waiting for.
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