The Wrong Lessons We Teach Children About Grief

Key Points

Most adults were taught to handle grief through six myths, that we should not feel bad, should replace the loss, grieve alone, wait for time to heal, be strong for others, and keep busy. Every one of them avoids actually grieving.

The Grief Recovery Institute estimates children receive about 23,000 messages by age fifteen telling them not to feel or share sadness.

Children often suppress grief on purpose to protect grieving adults, so a quiet child isn't necessarily a healed one.

A 2025 review found nearly a third of bereaved children were still grieving after nine months, with roughly triple the risk of depression when grief went unaddressed.

Divorce is one of the two most common adverse childhood experiences, affecting about one in four U.S. children, and higher ACE counts track with major long-term health risks.

The most useful shift a parent can make is from "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?"

Grief can be completed, and adults can unlearn the myths. Programs like the Grief Recovery Method and Helping Children With Loss exist to help.

A kid scrapes a knee, or a friend moves away, or the family dog dies, and here's what usually happens next. A well-meaning adult says something like "don't cry," or "you'll feel better soon," or my personal favorite, "here, have a cookie." We hand them a distraction and call it comfort.

I did versions of this for years without thinking about it. Then I lost my father and my nephew, and I found out the hard way that the instructions I'd been given for grief didn't work. I'm a retired submarine officer. I was very good at pushing feelings down and pressing on. It turns out that skill, which the Navy rewards, is close to useless when it comes to actually healing from a loss. That's the road that eventually led me to grief coaching, and to families going through divorce.

Here's the uncomfortable question underneath all of it. What if the way most of us were taught to handle grief is wrong, and we're passing it straight to our kids?

In my article about the book Hatchet , I discussed the impacts of unresolved grief. In addition to the immediate emotional pain, we also find ourselves limited in our ability to experience joy. Our ability to concentrate – or to connect with those around us – is also frequently impacted. We can even find that colors, scents, and everything around is muted.

The good news is that grief recovery is a powerful way of “completing” grief and regaining joy and vibrancy in our lives. I’ve experienced this myself and seen how it’s benefited others I’ve helped. This personal recovery has been profound. However, there are even more profound reasons to pursue grief recovery: the impact of adverse experiences on young people.

Twenty-three thousand messages

The Grief Recovery Institute estimates that by the time a child turns fifteen, they've received around 23,000 messages telling them, in one way or another, that they shouldn't feel bad, and definitely shouldn't burden anyone else with it. Nobody sits a child down and teaches this on purpose. It leaks out in a thousand small moments. Stop crying. Be strong. Don't dwell on it. You'll get over it.

Out of those moments come what grief specialists call the six myths of grief, the flawed lessons almost all of us absorbed:

Don't feel bad. Replace the loss. Grieve alone. Just give it time. Be strong for others. Keep busy.

Read that list again and notice something. Every one of them tells a grieving person to do anything except actually grieve. And every one of them is something we say to children constantly, usually while trying to help.

For a child of divorce, these myths land on an open wound. The family they knew is ending. That's a real loss, and it deserves real grief. Instead we often hand them the myths. Be strong for your mom. Don't worry, you'll like the new place. Keep busy with soccer and you'll forget about it. We're not being cruel. We're passing down the only playbook we got.

Why buried grief doesn't stay buried

The tidy thing about the myths is they seem to work. The child goes quiet. The crying stops. Everyone exhales.

The research says that quiet is not the same as healing. A 2025 review of childhood grief in the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine found that school-age children frequently suppress their feelings on purpose, specifically to avoid upsetting the grieving adults around them. They're not over it. They're managing us. That same review found nearly a third of bereaved children were still grieving more than nine months later, and that unaddressed grief was linked to roughly triple the risk of depression, along with higher rates of PTSD and trouble at school.

This is where a child's private, unfinished grief connects to something larger. Divorce is, according to Child Trends, one of the two most common adverse childhood experiences in the country, right beside economic hardship, and about one in four American kids goes through it. Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, are the events that flood a developing brain with stress. The CDC reports that three in four high school students have at least one, and one in five have four or more.

(Graphic from the Center for Disease Control.)

The count matters, and it follows them. The original ACE Study by Drs. Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda in 1998 was the first to show that childhood adversity tracks straight into adult disease and early death. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, later California's first Surgeon General, put numbers on it in her well-known TED talk: a person with four or more ACEs carries about four and a half times the risk of depression and twelve times the risk of a suicide attempt. At seven or more, the lifetime risk of lung cancer triples and heart disease risk rises three and a half times.

I'm not saying an unfinished cry over a divorce causes heart disease. I'm saying the habit we're teaching, seal it up and carry on, is the same habit that turns a hard experience into a lasting one. The loss isn't the whole danger. What we teach the child to do with it is.

The better question

There's a simple shift that changes almost everything, and it comes out of trauma-informed care. Stop asking a struggling child "What's wrong with you?" Start asking "What happened to you?"

The first question tells a kid they're broken. The second tells them they make sense, that whatever they're feeling is a reasonable response to something real. That one reframe opens a door the myths keep slamming shut.

From there, the moves are less complicated than parents fear, though they cut against instinct:

Let them feel bad without fixing it. When your child says they miss the way things were, you don't have to argue them out of it. "Yeah, I miss it too" beats "but look at everything good coming."

Don't make them be strong for you. A child who's protecting a parent isn't grieving, they're on duty. Let them off.

Tell the truth, simply. Kids fill silence with self-blame, often deciding the divorce was somehow their fault. Honest, age-appropriate words starve that story.

Grieve where they can see you. The strongest protection for a grieving child is an emotionally honest adult who isn't pretending to be fine. You don't have to come apart. You do have to be real.

I wrote a companion piece about all of this through the lens of a book a lot of kids read, Hatchet and what it teaches us about childhood grief. The boy in that story survives the wilderness by shutting off his feelings, and it's a great adventure and a terrible manual for a real child.

Unlearning is allowed

If you're reading this and recognizing the myths in your own mouth, go easy. You inherited them, same as I did. The good news is that grief can be completed, and it's never too late to learn how. The Grief Recovery Method, which peer-reviewed research out of Kent State found effective, is built for exactly this, and the "Helping Children With Loss" program trains the adults so they can steady the kids.

We can't protect children from every loss. Divorce, death, and disappointment are going to find them. What we can do is stop handing them a broken playbook, and teach them the thing most of us were never taught: that it's safe to feel it, safe to say it out loud, and safe to be held while they do.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the "six myths" of grief? They're the common but flawed beliefs most of us absorbed about loss: don't feel bad, replace the loss, grieve alone, just give it time, be strong for others, and keep busy. Each one, however well-intentioned, steers a grieving person away from processing the loss rather than toward it.

Isn't teaching kids to "be strong" a good thing? Resilience is good. The problem is when "be strong" really means "hide what you feel." A child who bottles grief to look strong is carrying it, not clearing it. Real strength includes the ability to feel a hard emotion, say it out loud, and move through it.

How is divorce a source of grief and not just stress? Grief is the natural response to any meaningful loss, and divorce ends the family a child has always known. Treating it as grief, rather than a problem to distract them out of, is what lets a child actually process it.

My child says they're fine. Do I take that at face value? Gently, no. Research shows many children mask their feelings to protect a parent. Keep checking in without pressure, make clear that every feeling is allowed, and remember that a calm surface isn't proof the grief has been dealt with.

I was raised on these myths. Can I still change how I handle grief? Yes. The myths are learned, which means they can be unlearned. Working through your own losses, sometimes with a grief specialist, not only helps you, it gives your child a living example of what honest grieving looks like.

Jon Ward is a Certified Advanced Grief Recovery Specialist® and a retired U.S. Navy submarine officer who works as a divorce and grief coach. He came to this work after the deaths of his father and nephew and offers one-on-one coaching along with the Grief Recovery and Helping Children With Loss programs.