Key Points
- In Hatchet, Brian's parents' divorce, not the plane crash, is the emotional core of the story, and his decision to stop crying and "just cope" mirrors how many children handle real loss.
- Children often suppress grief to protect the adults around them, which means the calm you see may not be the healing you hope for.
- A 2025 review found nearly a third of bereaved children were still grieving after nine months, and unaddressed grief roughly tripled their risk of depression.
- Parental divorce is one of the two most common adverse childhood experiences in the U.S., affecting about one in four children.
- Higher ACE counts track with serious long-term health risks, which is why helping a child process a loss now matters decades later.
- "Crying solves nothing" is half true. Tears don't fix the situation, but grief was never meant to be solved. It's meant to be felt and completed.
- The most protective thing a parent can offer is not the right answer but an honest, emotionally available presence.
I read
Hatchet as a kid and thought it was a survival story. A thirteen-year-old named Brian Robeson crashes a small plane into a Canadian lake, climbs out with nothing but the hatchet his mother gave him, and has to keep himself alive. Bush pilot dead. No radio. Just a boy, a lake, and the woods.
Years later, working with families in the middle of divorce, I understand what Gary Paulsen was actually writing about. The plane crash isn't the hard part of that book. The hard part is what Brian carries onto the plane. His parents are splitting up, and he's holding a secret: he saw his mother with another man before the separation. That weight sits in his chest the whole time he's building fires and catching fish. Paulsen calls it "the Secret," and Brian spends as much energy surviving it as he does surviving the wilderness.
That's the part I want to talk to parents about.
"Crying didn't help"
There's a moment early in the book that a lot of readers remember. Brian breaks down. He cries, hard, alone, and then he reaches a conclusion that sounds like wisdom: crying didn't help with the plane, or the woods, or his parents. What helped was focus. Determination. Effort. So he stops crying and gets to work.
I get why that lands. I spent twenty years as a Navy submarine officer. The whole culture runs on exactly that instinct, keep your head, do the next thing, feelings later. It kept me functional through some hard stretches. It also taught me a lesson I had to unlearn after my father and my nephew died, which is the thing that pushed me into grief work in the first place: pushing a feeling down doesn't process it. It just files it somewhere it can do damage later.
Brian's a fictional kid, so he gets to skip the bill. Real children don't. And the research on how kids actually grieve makes that painfully clear.
What children do with grief when we're not looking
A
2025 review of childhood grief published in the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine found something most parents miss. School-age children often suppress their own feelings specifically to protect the grieving adults around them. They watch us. They notice their questions make us uncomfortable, so they stop asking. The grief doesn't leave. It goes quiet.
And quiet grief doesn't stay small. That same review found nearly a third of bereaved children (30.8%) were still grieving more than nine months out, and roughly one in ten carried it past three years. Children with unaddressed grief showed about a threefold increase in the risk of depression, even after accounting for other factors, along with higher rates of PTSD, substance use, and problems at school.
Divorce belongs in this conversation, because for a child, divorce is a loss. The family they knew is ending. According to
Child Trends, parental separation or divorce is one of the two most common adverse childhood experiences in the country, sitting right alongside economic hardship. Roughly one in four American children has been through it. In some states it's closer to one in three.
That framing matters because of what we've learned about
adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. The CDC reports that three in four high school students have experienced at least one ACE, and one in five have experienced four or more. The count adds up, and it tracks forward into adulthood. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, who later served as California's first Surgeon General, laid out the math in
her research and TED talk: a person with four or more ACEs carries roughly four and a half times the risk of depression and twelve times the risk of a suicide attempt. At seven or more, you're looking at triple the lifetime risk of lung cancer and three and a half times the risk of heart disease.
Divorce is not a sentence. Plenty of children come through it steady and whole. But the difference between a child who metabolizes the loss and one who buries it usually comes down to whether an adult helped them feel it.
"Crying solves nothing" is half a truth
Here's what I'd tell Brian if I could. You're right that crying, by itself, doesn't fix the situation. Tears won't repair a marriage or reassemble a plane. But that was never their job. Grief isn't a problem to solve. It's an experience to move through. The goal isn't to feel better in the next ten minutes. It's to not be stuck in ten years.
I wrote more about how our whole culture gets this backward in a companion piece,
Have We Taught Our Children the Wrong Lessons About Grief? The short version: most of us were handed a set of instructions for grief that don't work. Don't feel bad. Keep busy. Be strong for everyone else. Replace the loss. We say these things to children with love, and we're teaching them to do exactly what Brian did, seal it up and press on.
The
Grief Recovery Method I'm trained in, which has been studied and found effective, starts from the opposite premise. Unresolved grief is cumulative, and it's cumulatively negative. What completes it isn't time and it isn't distraction. It's acknowledgment, honesty, and being heard by someone who won't rush to fix you.
What this looks like at your kitchen table
You don't need a certification to help your kid. You need to do a few things that run against instinct.
Let them be sad without managing it. When your child says they miss the old house, or the way things used to be, resist the urge to reframe it into something positive. "I know, I miss it too" does more than "but think of all the fun we'll have at the new place."
Ask better questions. A trauma-informed shift I use constantly is moving from "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" One puts a child on defense. The other opens a door.
Tell the truth in words they can hold. Children fill silence with self-blame. Preschoolers especially reach for magical thinking, deciding they caused the divorce by being bad. Plain, honest, age-appropriate information starves that story.
Model it yourself. The single strongest predictor of a child grieving well is an emotionally available adult who isn't pretending to be fine. You don't have to fall apart in front of them. You do have to be honest that this is hard.
Going into the holidays
If you're reading this heading into a season of first-time-apart holidays, go gently. On yourself and on them. The empty chair, the split calendar, the traditions that don't fit anymore, all of it is grief, and grief shows up loudest at the times that used to feel whole.
You don't have to have the perfect words. You have to be there, and be real, and let the sadness exist in the room without shooing it out. Brian survived his fifty-four days by refusing to feel much of anything. He's a great character. He's a lousy manual for raising a grieving child.
Feel it. Help them feel it. That's the work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is divorce really a form of grief for a child? Yes. Grief is the response to any significant loss, not only death. For a child, divorce ends the family structure they've always known, and the sadness, confusion, and anger that follow are grief. Naming it as grief helps you respond to it as grief.
My child seems fine. Should I be worried? Not necessarily, but "fine" deserves a closer look. Research shows many school-age children hide their feelings to avoid upsetting a parent. Keep the door open, ask gentle questions, and make it clear there's no wrong thing to feel. A calm surface isn't proof the grief has been processed.
Won't talking about it just make my child more upset? Talking doesn't create the pain. The loss already did that. What conversation does is give the pain somewhere to go besides inward. Age-appropriate honesty tends to reduce a child's anxiety, because kids handle a hard truth better than a scary silence they fill with self-blame.
What if I'm barely holding myself together? That's common, and you don't have to be fully healed to help your child. You do have to be honest. Letting your kid see that you're sad but okay teaches them that grief is survivable. If you're stuck, working with a grief specialist for yourself often turns out to be the best thing you can do for them, too.
When should I get outside help? Consider reaching out if grief is interfering with sleep, school, friendships, or daily functioning for more than a few weeks, if you see signs of depression or self-harm, or if you simply feel out of your depth. Structured programs like Helping Children With Loss exist for exactly this, and there's no prize for going it alone.
Jon Ward is a Certified Advanced Grief Recovery Specialist® and a retired U.S. Navy submarine officer who now works as a divorce and grief coach. He came to this work after the losses of his father and nephew and offers one-on-one coaching along with the Grief Recovery and Helping Children With Loss programs.
