How to Talk to Kids About Death and the Loss of a Grandparent
As parents, we expect to guide our children through scraped knees, big feelings, and friendship troubles. But one of the most emotionally complex challenges we face is explaining death to a child—especially when it’s tied to the deeply personal experience of the loss of a grandparent.
If you’re struggling with how to talk to kids about death or wondering how to help a child grieve the loss of a grandparent without overwhelming or scaring them—this guide is for you.
As both a psychologist and a parent, I’ve seen firsthand how painful and confusing loss of a grandparent can be—not only for kids but for the adults trying to help them through it. Whether the loss was sudden or came after a long illness, one thing is clear: children process grief differently, and they need our support, honesty, and presence.
Why Talking About Death Is So Hard—for Us and for Them
Let’s face it: how to talk to kids about death is not something most of us learned growing up. So when it becomes real in your own home—after loss of a grandparent—it can feel like you’re totally unprepared.
Your child may ask questions you don’t know how to answer. They may seem unaffected, only to ask, “Is Grandma really dead?” over pancakes weeks later. Or they may spiral into anxiety about their own death—or yours. Meanwhile, you’re trying to hold it together while managing your own grief.
So how do we do this well? By getting curious, being present, and having a clear understanding of what kids need based on their age and development.
Understand the Developmental Stages of Understanding Death
A toddler doesn’t process death the same way a 10-year-old does.
And even the same child may revisit their grief as they grow. Understanding the developmental stages of understanding death can help you tailor your conversations and expectations.
For example:
Young children may believe death is reversible or temporary
Elementary-aged kids may start to grasp permanence but still rely on magical thinking
Tweens and teens may begin to ask more philosophical or existential questions
No matter your child’s age, knowing what’s normal at their stage of development helps you meet them where they are with the loss of a grandparent—and respond with honesty and compassion.
What’s Normal (and What’s Not) After the Loss of a Grandparent
Grief in children doesn’t always look like sadness. It can look like irritability, withdrawal, aggression, or even silliness. They may bring up death weeks or months after loss of a grandparent, just as you’re starting to feel like things are calming down.
This is all normal. Common behaviors include:
Repetitive questions about death
Acting out themes of death in play
Regression (bedwetting, tantrums, clinginess)
Physical complaints (headaches, stomachaches)
Rather than trying to “fix” these behaviors, focus on offering stability, empathy, and open communication.
How to Talk to Kids About Death Without Overwhelming Them
The way we respond makes all the difference. Here’s what helps:
Use clear, concrete language. Saying “Grandma died” is more helpful than “We lost Grandma.”
Avoid euphemisms that can be confusing or scary.
Give small doses of information and allow your child to lead with their questions.
It’s okay to say, “I don’t know.” You don’t need all the answers.
When you’re explaining death to a child, keep in mind their age, temperament, and emotional bandwidth. The goal isn’t to erase their pain—it’s to stay connected through it.
How to Help a Child Grieve the Loss of a Grandparent
Helping your child grieve starts with being present. Here are three expert-backed strategies you can use:
1. Normalize their feelings and expressions of grief.
Create safe space for their emotions without judgment. Validate their feelings, even if they come out sideways—through anger, questions, or play. Show them it’s okay to feel sad, confused, or even a little silly about the loss of a grandparent.
2. Respect their unique communication style.
Some kids talk openly; others process through art, stories, or symbolic play. Be available without forcing conversations or over-explaining death to a child. When in doubt, just listen.
3. Incorporate rituals and remembrance.
Writing letters, drawing pictures, creating memory boxes, celebrating birthdays or anniversaries—these small acts of remembrance can be healing. Rituals help children understand the permanence of death while keeping the connection to their loved one alive.
These practices can gently support how to help a child grieve the loss of a grandparent in meaningful, age-appropriate ways.
You Matter, Too
Supporting your child through the loss of a grandparent doesn’t mean ignoring your own pain. In fact, being honest about your grief—without asking your child to take care of you—is one of the best things you can do.
Your child learns by watching you. Let them see that it’s okay to cry, to talk about someone you miss, and to ask for help. If you’re finding it difficult to manage your own grief, therapy is not only appropriate—it’s wise.
A Note for When You're Ready to Go Deeper
If you're seeking more support or want to hear real examples from parents who’ve been there, I invite you to listen to my full conversation with Dr. Liz Ross from Coping Resource Center on the Educated Parent podcast.
We talk candidly about how to help a child grieve the loss of a grandparent, explaining death to a child, and how to approach these conversations through the lens of the developmental stages of understanding death.
You’ll leave feeling more grounded, more prepared, and more connected—to your child and to yourself.
Let’s bring more compassion, honesty, and confidence into this incredibly important conversation.
You’ve got this—and we’re here to help.
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Connect with Dr. Liz Ross:
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[00:00:00] Leah Clionsky: Welcome to the Educated Parent Podcast. I am so glad that you're joining us today because I am thrilled about the guests that I'm bringing on, and I cannot wait to introduce her to you. But before I introduce her, I do wanna give you a little bit of a trigger warning because the topic of this podcast is sad today.
[00:00:17] Leah Clionsky: As you know, the purpose of the Educated Parent Podcast is so that I can give you expert tips on how to solve everyday parenting problems. And unfortunately, a problem that will happen to many, many of us is helping our kids cope with the loss of a loved one, like a grandparent or an elderly relative.
[00:00:34] Leah Clionsky: And that's our topic for today. So we're going to be talking about that loss, and my guest and I are both going to be sharing a little bit of personal experience because this does affect us directly. So I just want you to be aware of that. If this is too heavy for you today, if this is not what you wanna listen to in your carpool commute.
[00:00:50] Leah Clionsky: Pause the podcast. It's gonna be here for you at another time. If it's right for you, you are listening to Educated Parent the Parenting [00:01:00] Podcast, where I teach you realistic expert parenting hacks to solve your everyday parenting problems. So that you can reduce your stress, build your confidence as a parent, and raise thriving children.
[00:01:13] Leah Clionsky: My name is Dr. Leah Clionsky and I'm a licensed clinical psychologist, owner of Thriving Child Center and PCIT Experts, child Psychology Practices. And a real life parent of two young children, I am the same as you. I am invested in being the best parent possible and raising thriving children. I also get overwhelmed.
[00:01:34] Leah Clionsky: I make mistakes and I forget what works. I do have three unique parenting advantages that you may not have. A PhD in child clinical psychology over 15 years of clinical experience working with families and a network of other experts that I can text for parenting advice whenever I'm lost. I'm here to bring my expertise and my expert network to you so that we can solve your everyday parenting dilemmas [00:02:00] together.
[00:02:00] Leah Clionsky: I, I'm so glad you're here. I am so excited to introduce Dr. Liz Ross. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and the founder of the Coping Resource Center in Houston, Texas, which is a group practice that specializes in evidence-based therapy for sleep disorders, chronic pain, trauma, and anxiety related conditions.
[00:02:21] Leah Clionsky: On a side note, she also shares office space with Thriving Child Center. So if you come see us in our River Oaks location, you will be in both clinics at the same time. With over a decade of clinical experience, Dr. Ross is known for helping clients navigate life's toughest transitions with compassion and clarity.
[00:02:39] Leah Clionsky: I love referring to her. She's fantastic. Welcome, Dr. Ross.
[00:02:43] Liz Ross: Thank you. As another aside, I wanna also mention that Dr. Clionsky. Happened to be one of my supervisors on postdoc. And so my favorite story about you, Leah, is that you know, when we are both first starting out in private practice, we're trying to support each [00:03:00] other and endorse each other as clinicians and in, in all of Leah's.
[00:03:04] Liz Ross: Endorsements she mentioned Dr. Ross is very well trained, and so I wanna say that that's very true and I wanna give a huge thank you for, you know, all your help along the way. Oh, that is so
[00:03:16] Leah Clionsky: sweet. I cannot take credit. But I'm really, really excited that you are here because we're gonna talk about something where you actually have more training on discussing grief than I do, and I'm so glad that you're here to offer your expertise.
[00:03:31] Leah Clionsky: So now that we've talked about how educated you are, tell me a little bit about you as a parent. You have littles. I do. I do.
[00:03:39] Liz Ross: So I've got two kids. I've got a 9-year-old, a boy named James, and I've got a just turned 5-year-old girl named Peyton. And so we are in sort of that very, very busy stage of life as you are too, right?
[00:03:53] Liz Ross: Running around to baseball and ballet and everything in between. So it's been a lot of fun. As you know, Liam, [00:04:00] we've talked about this a good bit. Both of us have experienced personally what we're gonna talk about on podcast today. So we've both had to navigate these really difficult conversations about grief and death and dying and whatnot with our own kids.
[00:04:13] Liz Ross: As you know, my own father passed away October 31st, 2023. Halloween unexpectedly. And so we've had to navigate that. And before that, you know, believe it or not, my husband's grandfather was still alive when my son was born and up until he was six or seven years old. So for quite a while he knew my husband's grandfather and when he passed away, you know, we had to navigate some of those conversations as well.
[00:04:39] Leah Clionsky: Yeah,
I'm
[00:04:40] Leah Clionsky: so sorry. I remember when that happened. It was so hard. And I'll also share that my mother passed away last May from complications of pancreatic cancer. It was a long illness, but it was a very unexpected death. So it's tough. You know, I'm coming up on that anniversary too, so this is a topic that.
[00:04:58] Leah Clionsky: Is sad. That [00:05:00] does affect many of us. And then you're trying to be the best parent you can possibly be in the context of your own grief that you're experiencing as part of what's so hard about it is it's affecting you, it's hitting you, and then you have children. How are you gonna help them cope with their own grief?
[00:05:16] Liz Ross: Exactly. Exactly. I think that's the hardest part is. In this phase of life, you know, you're trying to create your own space to be able to grieve yourself, but you've got all these other, other obligations and other responsibilities, right. And you've gotta also be there for your kids as they're struggling through it too.
[00:05:33] Leah Clionsky: Yeah. So I'm so glad you're here because as always, we're going to give you specific strategies if you're going through this, if this happens to you in the future, which of course I hope it doesn't, but if you end up in this situation. You know, what can we do to support our kids while we're going through this process?
[00:05:49] Liz Ross: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much Leah. And again, you know, I think for us, we've talked about this a lot as professionals and as parents, and in a lot of ways I do feel like [00:06:00] going through it personally has really enhanced the way that I'm able to navigate that with my clients. As well. I don't know if you've, you feel like you've had a similar experience.
[00:06:08] Leah Clionsky: Yeah, it's, well, it's, it can be helpful to, there are pros and cons to going through the same things that your clients are going through. Right. It makes you realistic about what other people's experiences are. Sometimes it can make you too close to them. So there have been times where I haven't been willing to work with clients that are experiencing the same thing I'm experiencing for that reason.
[00:06:28] Leah Clionsky: But at this point, I feel pretty okay doing that.
[00:06:31] Liz Ross: Yeah, I, I would agree with that too. Right. Sometimes when it hits too close to home. And you also don't wanna be too assumptive with your clients, right? That whatever you're going through isn't necessarily the exact same experience that they're having.
[00:06:43] Liz Ross: Right. So let's start off there with just saying that grief can take a lot of different forms and that can look different depending on, like you're saying, the circumstances, whether or not it was expected, unexpected, what your relationship was like with that person, the age of that [00:07:00] person. There's so many different factors that can factor in when we're talking about kids.
[00:07:05] Liz Ross: Specifically, they're gonna understand the grief process differently as their brains mature and depending on where they are developmentally. So.
[00:07:14] Leah Clionsky: Right, exactly. Like for my kids, when their grandmother passed away, that was how they learned what death was. Right. So it was like, oh, by the way, people can die and also your grandmother is not coming back.
[00:07:26] Leah Clionsky: So that's upsetting. Double whammy of information to get at the same time. Yeah.
[00:07:30] Liz Ross: Right. Exactly. And so, you know, a lot of times we don't feel very prepared Right. To have start having those conversations. Right. You don't think about talking about death to a toddler, which is around the age that your kids were when your mom passed away.
[00:07:46] Liz Ross: Right.
[00:07:46] Leah Clionsky: Right.
[00:07:47] Liz Ross: Yeah. Those concepts are pretty foreign to them.
[00:07:50] Leah Clionsky: Mm-hmm. You don't really actually think about how to explain this to your kids. I don't think under any circumstances like Oh. What time is baseball practice and also how should I explain death? [00:08:00] That's a pretty big topic to explain to children.
[00:08:03] Liz Ross: Right? Exactly. Let me teach you how to read. Oh, by the way, do you know what happens to people after they die? Right. These aren't like normal conversations that we think of to have with our kids until it's actually happening. Right? Until either. You're experiencing death within your family, or they're hearing about somebody else dying or something like that, right?
Mm-hmm.
[00:08:20] Liz Ross: And then maybe I'll just speak for myself, but I'll say a lot of times I feel like in in Western societies, in western culture, there is a lot of anxiety about talking about death, right? And feeling like we have to give our kids all of the answers. It is something where. Regardless of your belief system or anything else, we don't, none of us know exactly what happens, right?
[00:08:41] Liz Ross: It's these questions that don't have these really concrete explanations, right? If your kid asks you why the sky is blue, I can go to Google and um, figure that out and then answer their question, right? But for something like this, they're gonna ask you a lot of questions that are going to make you feel uncomfortable, to be [00:09:00] honest.
[00:09:00] Leah Clionsky: Oh yeah. They're gonna ask you everything about death and then also. It may occur to them, oh, I can die too. Like my mom, my parents can die and also I can die. And so I can tell you that's something that came up a lot for my daughter. Is she still asking me about her own death? Which is also an upsetting topic, right?
[00:09:20] Leah Clionsky: But that's developmentally appropriate. So if you're, if something like this happens and then your kid suddenly discovers death and then becomes worried about their own mortality. That is expected. That doesn't mean that you're working through a bad grief process, or your child is, you know, you should be very worried about their mental health.
[00:09:38] Leah Clionsky: That is pretty typical.
[00:09:40] Liz Ross: That is pretty typical. And so both of those things that you mentioned, right? So concern about when you're gonna die, right? And realizing that, oh, my parents might not be here forever, is extremely anxiety provoking for a child, right? They're dependent on you for their own survival and their own love, and then concerned about their own mortality.
[00:09:57] Liz Ross: And so. For [00:10:00] example, you know, after my husband's grandfather died, my son started asking a lot of questions about, well, how old was he? And how old are you? And like, are you gonna die at 97 too? And, and how is that gonna happen? And you know, it's hard to explain that. Yes, most people die when they're older, but it's not a guarantee without frightening them, right?
[00:10:20] Liz Ross: Without them worrying all the time about your safety. How did that look for your kids?
[00:10:24] Leah Clionsky: I mean, it concerns them. Well, it concerns my older child, right? My son is three. He still hasn't quite grasped that like the mortality of other people other than his grandmother. But my daughter worries about that a lot.
[00:10:37] Leah Clionsky: What if something happens to you? What will then happen to me? And a lot of times when kids are asking about what will happen to you, what they're really asking is, will I be okay? Like if something happens to you, is there a plan? Will I be okay? Will I survive? This is basically what they're trying to figure out.
[00:10:54] Leah Clionsky: And that's not 'cause they don't love you, it's 'cause little children are very self-focused. That's also [00:11:00] just the way that they think about the world. So they're looking for their own safety a lot of the time. Right.
[00:11:04] Liz Ross: Right. If you think about it, you know, we're all really wired for survival. And so anything that that's a trigger for, oh, this could threaten my survival, is going to create that fear or response, right?
[00:11:17] Leah Clionsky: So what do we do, Dr. Ross? How do we support our kids when we're going through something like this? What do you suggest?
[00:11:24] Liz Ross: Those are good questions. So I would say the first thing to do is. Create space for your kids to talk about it. I think that we all have this sort of knee-jerk reaction when someone's upset to try to fix their feelings.
[00:11:37] Liz Ross: Mm-hmm.
Right?
[00:11:38] Liz Ross: And try to say something to make them feel better. I think that's just. Sort of human nature. Like, okay, what can I say to put a positive spin on this or brighten them up, or something like that. And when you're talking about grief and death, the processing of the emotions is actually the important part, right?
[00:11:53] Liz Ross: Allowing them to be sad and allowing them to work through that grief is what's gonna help them to get over it and get through it. [00:12:00] And so even if it's uncomfortable for you, which it probably will be to see your kids in distress. I think that's uncomfortable for all of us. We don't like to see our kids in distress allowing those conversations.
[00:12:12] Liz Ross: To happen.
[00:12:13] Leah Clionsky: Yeah. So avoid saying things like, don't cry, grandma wouldn't have wanted you to be sad. Avoid putting a burden on your children that they shouldn't have emotions. Also, little kids, you know, and I, I guess we're speaking more for younger children here. Right? But they don't react the way you think they will.
[00:12:30] Leah Clionsky: So their initial reaction. Might not be that upset, like they might not have a whole lot of to process the day that you tell them, but they may then bring it up repeatedly later on. My kids are still saying things to me like almost a year later, like, Hey mom, is Grandma Lynn dead? They don't just randomly in the morning when I'm having coffee.
[00:12:51] Leah Clionsky: So kids bring it up at different times when they realize different things. Like after they watched The Lion King, suddenly we had to talk about it more. So [00:13:00] don't expect it to be like an adult where they're gonna have that initial deep grief period. And then, you know, the processing might happen differently over time.
[00:13:08] Leah Clionsky: Kids just, every time they hit a developmental milestone and they think about it, they reprocess it with you again. So your child might bring it up all the time, or they might almost never bring it up. It's really child dependent.
[00:13:20] Liz Ross: It really is. And, and to your point, you know. Depending on their developmental stage, they're going to understand and process that grief very differently.
[00:13:29] Liz Ross: So a child who's, for example, five and under, you know, might not have a really great understanding of the permanence of death. Right, right. And so they're gonna be asking a lot of questions like, you know, our, our own family's belief system is around heaven. That does not have to be your family's belief system.
[00:13:45] Liz Ross: That's just how we understand and explain death and dying within our family. And so, you know, having to explain, you know, they called my dad Bubba. And so, you know, bub was in heaven and my daughter kept asking if we could go visit him in heaven if, when he was coming back from [00:14:00] heaven, you know, if he was gonna come back and bring her birthday presents on her birthday.
[00:14:04] Liz Ross: And those conversations. Like you said, happened sort of repeatedly, right? Just because of her developmental understanding of where she was. Right. And also when kids get older, they might have to kind of reprocess death and dying again because they're understanding the world differently and their brains are at a different developmental stage.
[00:14:25] Liz Ross: So just because you've had those conversations. With your kid at a certain age doesn't mean they're not gonna bring it up again. And that also doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with them continuing to bring it up and trying to sort through it.
[00:14:36] Leah Clionsky: Yeah, exactly. It can be hard on you to have to have rehab those discussions right over and over and over again.
[00:14:43] Leah Clionsky: But you want to allow, you don't wanna put pressure on your child to not talk about the thing that's going on. Like Dr. Ross said, you wanna create space for that conversation.
[00:14:53] Liz Ross: And I would also say, I've heard a lot of adults parents say. Oh, I don't want my kids to see [00:15:00] me cry, or I don't want them to see me upset.
[00:15:02] Liz Ross: And I think that in this case, it's really okay for your kids to see you emote and know that they also have permission to emote as well. And that it's completely understandable that if you lose your own parent, that you're gonna be sad about that, right? You're gonna cry about that. And so you don't need to feel like you need to necessarily shield all of your grief.
[00:15:26] Liz Ross: From your kids. That can be a somewhat shared experience with them.
[00:15:30] Leah Clionsky: Yeah. Yeah. My kids have definitely seen me cry about the death of my mom. I mean, multiple times. Especially if they surprise me early in the morning by bringing it up. You know, it can happen. There's a difference though. I'm not relying on them.
[00:15:42] Leah Clionsky: To make me feel better. Right. Yeah. I'm sad they watch me cope. Right. I'm not expecting them to like be my support system through the death of my mother, so they can recognize it, but then they're not responsible. And I think that's another, there's the flip side, right? Where you can have your feelings and then you don't [00:16:00] wanna rely on your children to be your emotional support.
[00:16:02] Leah Clionsky: Absolutely.
[00:16:03] Liz Ross: Absolutely. Just like. You're not there to necessarily fix their feelings in the moment. They're not there to fix their feelings in the moment either.
[00:16:10] Leah Clionsky: So our first big tip is to give your children space to experience their feelings and to let that take whatever shape is right for your child.
[00:16:20] Leah Clionsky: Yes,
[00:16:21] Liz Ross: right, exactly. And to that point, I think for kids, because you know, they're not necessarily gonna sit down and have an adult conversation like we are right now about it. That could take a lot of different shapes. So for some kids being able to act something out or tell a story or write a story might be the way that they're actually processing their grief.
[00:16:41] Liz Ross: So if you see your kid all of a sudden. Start to have some dark themes in their play and their creative play. That's completely normal and it's actually could be a helpful process for them for getting through. Sometimes that might look like drawing pictures or doing art or something else that might be [00:17:00] lean in a little bit more to, again, where they are developmentally.
[00:17:03] Liz Ross: You have older kids. I guess a little bit of a warning is that you, well, you wanna create space. You don't wanna be too pushy about trying to make them talk about how they're feeling all the time, because sometimes that can elicit some resistance, right? I'm not sure if any of you ever had the parent who was like knocking on your door all the time saying like, are you okay?
[00:17:24] Liz Ross: Are you okay? Are you okay? And then, you know, it's like, well, I was okay, but you know, now you're knocking on my door all the time and you know, invading my privacy and not feeling so, okay. Particularly if you have, let's say, like adolescent kids or something like that where there's space in independence.
[00:17:39] Liz Ross: Is gonna be really important to them. You're still going to create that space, and when they come to you to talk about those things, you still want to be open and non-judgmental and all those things that are gonna encourage that conversation. But if you're pushing it too much, that actually could be sort of a deterrent for them to talking about it.
[00:17:57] Leah Clionsky: Right. So you might see for younger [00:18:00] children, suddenly all their stuffed animals might die, right? Like you may like, if that happens, don't panic. They're processing. You want them to process. And for adolescents, you know, you may go in and say something like, your grandmother died. I. This is really hard. I'm not pushing you, but I am here.
[00:18:16] Leah Clionsky: Anytime you wanna talk about it, I am available. And then you leave them alone. Right? Sometimes leaving people alone is really hard when you're, you're like, you're in pain and I want you to come to me, and you just can't. You can't make people talk to you when they don't want to. So you're creating space and then you're basically respecting communication styles is the second tip.
[00:18:37] Leah Clionsky: Absolutely. Yeah,
[00:18:39] Liz Ross: where they are. And to your point, Leah, a little anecdote. So I think after my husband's great father passed away, all of a sudden our son was taking all of his dinosaurs and his dinosaurs were like eating cars and eating things, and he was acting out death and dying in a very kind of graphic violent way, which was a little distressing [00:19:00] to us, but it was sort of part of his way of helping to process through that.
[00:19:04] Liz Ross: And it did not. Extend indefinitely. Right? He's not still taking dinosaurs and creatures and things like that and acting out and violently mulling cars or anything like that. So I know it's, it's easy for us as parents to react to something that seems abnormal to us, right? But realizing that within the context of what was going on, we needed to allow him to have some place to be able to understand and express his emotions,
[00:19:30] Leah Clionsky: right.
[00:19:31] Leah Clionsky: And so the third big tip we're going to give you
[00:19:33] Liz Ross: is to find a way to sort of memorialize the death. And so that can look a lot of different ways, but just having, you know, an opportunity for you and your kids to. Share memories in some way. And so you don't have to use this tip specifically what we did, but, so I mentioned earlier in the podcast, you know that my father had passed away in Halloween.
[00:19:59] Liz Ross: My [00:20:00] husband's idea was to go to the graveyard on Halloween. I was not as big of a fan of that specific day. I didn't think that was the best idea, but the next day is all seen stay, and I thought that was kind of perfect because. My dad was such a great guy and really wanted to encourage and lift people up, and I thought that day seemed a bit more significant to me as a day to kind of memorialize his memory.
[00:20:22] Liz Ross: And so, you know, the whole family, me and my kids, we went out there that day. We told stories about him. We did a prayer. My husband had read a letter that my grandfather, we found after, after my dad passed away, that my grandfather wrote him. It was really special. I have a, another friend recently actually, that her father-in-law passed away and she's got a daughter soon age to my daughter and her daughter has been wearing, you know, the necklaces that her grandfather Pappy gave her since then.
[00:20:50] Liz Ross: And, and sometimes for kids having something really like concrete and tangible like that can be really helpful in sort of a transitional object for them, you [00:21:00] know, as they are grieving the loss of someone.
[00:21:02] Leah Clionsky: Yeah.
[00:21:02] Liz Ross: I
[00:21:03] Leah Clionsky: love that, Liz, I love that you did that. Bring your dad. Sometimes kids will do it on their own.
[00:21:07] Leah Clionsky: My daughter made a Valentine's Day card for my mom, and I was like, but Grandma Lynn is not alive. And she said, we can still love her and write her a card even though she's not alive anymore. Mommy. And I think it was really comforting to her. And if I had thought more about that, maybe I would've encouraged it.
[00:21:27] Leah Clionsky: But she sometimes kids really do cope with things on their own in a way that is inspiring. To us, you know, where you, you think you have to go in and solve things for them, but sometimes they do figure things out in their own way. One thing, um, I do wanna make sure we do say in this podcast is that if this is really hard, if you are having a tough time, which is very understandable with the loss of a family member, and it makes the idea of your child bringing up these things with you is very painful.
[00:21:55] Leah Clionsky: It makes sense to be in your own therapy for it. I'm in my own therapy to deal [00:22:00] with the loss of my mom. Like everybody can benefit from that when you're going through something tough so that you're able to process your grief in a helpful way, and then also then you're able to be there for your kids. So taking care of yourself is taking care of your kids, and if you're going through something like this.
[00:22:17] Leah Clionsky: Dr. Ross's clinic is a fantastic place to go, so I just wanna let you know about that. Be transparent about how helpful and healing that can be, because being a good parent is being true and kind and compassionate with yourself for Ev all of us.
[00:22:33] Liz Ross: Absolutely. And to your point, I think I've talked a lot about this, but when you know you as an adult lose a parent, a lot of different emotions can come up, but it can be a really.
[00:22:46] Liz Ross: Surreal process. I think we never kind of lose that need for a parent even. You know, if you're in middle age or you're a parent yourself, you always want that person to go to. That's gonna help you get through whatever period of [00:23:00] life you're in, right? Whether that's like a mentor or a peer family member, or whoever that is.
[00:23:05] Liz Ross: And when you lose that, it's kind of like, wait, does this mean that I'm supposed to know the answer? I'm supposed to be the adult now. I'm supposed to know the answers. I don't have that person anymore. And that transition can really be tough to go to and so go through. And so having that. Space, be able to come process your own feelings about what's going on and process that loss.
[00:23:26] Liz Ross: And sometimes, you know, sort of depending on what your relationship was with that person, those feelings can be really complicated. I know we've talked about this before, but for example, if somebody has like a really challenging relationship with their own parent. Sometimes they might expect to feel, let's say, even like relief or something like that, especially if that person's been suffering for a long time and then they might be surprised that they feel so emotional about it.
[00:23:54] Liz Ross: So sad about it, right?
[00:23:56] Leah Clionsky: Being a human is hard. It is we're all [00:24:00] human. We are even humans when we are well-trained psychologists, which is why we are here being human with you today. Well, I am so, so glad you were able to join us for this episode. If you are, I. Looking for some excellent clinicians to help you through your grief.
[00:24:16] Leah Clionsky: You have access to Dr. Ross's clinic. Coping resource center is in all of the show notes and ways to reach her are on the show notes as well. Thank you for joining us today, and I look. Forward to talking with you and another time. Thanks so much for having me. Oh, thanks so much for coming on Liz. This is wonderful.
[00:24:37] Leah Clionsky: Thanks again for spending time with me on Educated Parent if this episode helped you feel more confident in handling those parenting curve balls. Hit follow. So you never miss an episode. Know a parent who's stuck in the endless cycle of conflicting advice. Send this their way because we all deserve parenting strategies we can actually trust.
[00:24:59] Leah Clionsky: And hey, if you [00:25:00] have a minute, leave a review. Your support helps other parents find real expert back solutions instead of just another opinion online. One last quick reminder. This podcast offers general advice, but every family is different. The advice offered in this podcast is not medical advice and is not appropriate for every family.
[00:25:21] Leah Clionsky: If you need personalized parenting support, connect with an experienced clinician at Thriving Child Center or PCIT experts. That's it for today. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next time.