Grieving While the World is Celebrating - Helping Kids Get Through the Holidays After Loss
Have the holidays felt heavier after a loss? Are you or a family member navigating grief this holiday season?
This time of year often comes with the expectation of joyous celebrations, togetherness and comfort. For many, another holiday season can signify the opposite - sorrow, heartache, and grief, highlighting absence. For grieving children, this contrast can feel confusing and painful.
Grief Can Appear Differently in Children
While adults may logically understand why the holidays are difficult after a loss, children can be less predictable. Like adults, kids don’t grieve in a linear way - you might see moments of play and laughter mixed with moments of increased irritability or outbursts. Children can feel intense emotions but often have a harder time labeling and making sense of those feelings.
Inside the Grieving Child’s Brain
Brain development can limit how a loss is felt and understood. Their prefrontal cortex, the center of meaning-making, reasoning, and permanence, is still maturing. Loss activates the amygdala (the hub for threats and rewards) which can contribute to thoughts like, “my world doesn’t feel safe anymore.” Grief in children can manifest both physically and emotionally - often through anxiety, headaches/stomach aches, clinginess, irritability, anger, withdrawal, emotional numbness, or regression. Regressive behaviors might look like bed-wetting, sleep issues, or baby talk - the brain’s way of coping with stress and trauma.
What Kids Need Most
Notice when a child might have a sudden outburst over a holiday decoration, a physical complaint of not feeling well while watching a holiday movie, or not having an appetite at a meal. When children are consuming strong sensory cues (music, smells, decorations, TV, social media) emphasizing togetherness, they might feel pressure to “keep things together.”
Give kids permission to feel how they feel - no pressure.
Help a child prepare for intense feelings - come up with a plan to take a walk, talk about the loss/loved one, find a distraction, etc.
Help create “flexible” traditions - modify traditions rather than forcing old ones, giving the child a choice to control how they participate.
Know feelings can change moment to moment.
Normalize grief for all ages and validate their experience.
Explain that joy and grief can exist at the same time.