For the past few months, I have been writing on the steps most commonly associated with The Grieving Process for Adults. Those steps include: Numbness, Denial, Bargaining, Emotions, Forgiveness, Acceptance. I recently spent several weeks on Emotions, the bulk of The Grieving Process.

Before going on to the Forgiveness Step, I would like to pause this week and introduce you once again to the book I published in 2013 for children, Helping Hurting Children: A Journey of Healing.

My main purpose in writing this book came out of years of teaching adult classes on grieving at my local church.  I began to see a pattern emerge from women and men who came into the class to grieve through a current loss. I witnessed them come to the realization that, not only did they need healing from a current loss, but they also realized some of their childhood hurts had not been resolved from long years ago. With that discovery, I began to see the importance of building a foundation for children at an early stage in life to help them cope with losses.

As I began researching grief in children in an effort to write the book, I discovered that children are often over-looked during a time of loss and the pain that accompanies it. Why?

In his book, entitled, Recovering from the Losses of Life, by H. Norman Wright, he states 3 possibilities why children are overlooked:

1. Sometimes adults, unintentionally, get caught up in their own pain and they fail to recognize that their child is also hurting.
2. Often times, a child’s pain is overlooked because children do not express their pain in ways adults recognize.
3. “Probably the #1 reason children are overlooked during times of loss is because the primary adult in the child’s life just simple doesn’t know “how to help the child.”

Those three sentences set the wheels of my passion for helping hurting children on fire. I became determined to put into the hands of parents, grandparents, children’s ministers, school officials, lay counselors, and any caring adult a hands-on-tool to implement the fundamental principles needed in helping a child find healing from the emotional scars of losses.

And so, if you would like to join me in this crusade and get involved, click onto Suggestions for Utilizing Children’s Workbook (PDF) to see how you can get involved.

May we all work together to become the catalyst in helping a child grow into adulthood free of hurts from his childhood.

Join me next week where I will continue with the next step in Grieving Process for Adults: Forgiveness.