Many children and teens have grief and loss experiences. It has been estimated that up to 1 in 15 young people experience the death of a parent or sibling by the age of 16. One study found 80% of 11-16 year olds report experiencing the death of a “close” family member or friend. Many children also experience other significant losses – for instance the “loss” of the family unit through parental separation, sudden loss of a family home (house fire/disaster), the death of a pet, loss of some aspect of health/mobility, or the loss of a favourite or treasured activity or possession.

Here are some ways we can support our children and teens through grief and loss experiences.

Research shows that children and teens who struggle with anxiety “think in different ways” compared with children who do not have these challenges.

Studies have found children with anxiety are more likely to remember negative information in their environment, interpret ambiguous situations as potentially dangerous, and be able to identify a greater number of threats in any given situation. Other studies have found that the more anxious thinking a young person does, and the longer periods of time they spend worrying the more anxiety they experience.

Here are some steps we can take as parents to help children and teens manage their worried thoughts….

Tina is in year 1, lives with her Mum and her older brother, and is very anxious about going to school. This issue has been a challenge for Tina and her Mum for some time – from kindergarten onwards.

However since starting year 1, Tina has become even more anxious. Every school morning, while Mum tries to convince her that she will be okay at school, she cries, yells, says she is sick, throws things, says “I hate you so much” and hits her Mum. Sometimes she vomits. Tina gets a stomach ache and headache most afternoons when she thinks about school the next day.

Tina is now only going to school once a week and has missed over 50 days of school this year.

As well as being anxious about going to school, Tina also feels uncomfortable staying with her grandparents when Mum goes out on the weekend, and does not want her Mum to leave when she goes to other children’s houses to play.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I’ve recently been undergoing physiotherapy rehabilitation after having tendon surgery. At my first visit, the physio had me download an “app” which lists my daily exercises, uses an alarm notification to remind me to complete them and has a “tick off” function for each exercise after I complete them daily. I’m an old hand at rehab and so am generally committed to doing it consistently, but having a visual record of exercise completion over a week in this app has provided extra incentive make sure I don’t miss any days.

What this clever app is doing is encouraging me to do a form of what psychologists (and others) call “self monitoring”.

Self monitoring is simply paying attention to a specific aspect of our life – usually a behaviour or a mood - and regularly recording whether or when that behaviour or mood happened.

Self monitoring has been used for decades by psychologists (and other health professionals) to help people change something about their life or emotions. For example, we might ask people to record – on a daily basis - their mood on a scale of 1-10, how often they used a helpful or unhelpful coping strategy, what they ate, how often they got angry, how often they practiced a meditation task, their thoughts in a difficult situation, their worry behaviours, how often they drank alcohol – and many more types of behaviours.

Dealing with Coronavirus can be tough for everyone – kids, young people and adults – from all walks of life. For children with “big feelings” and challenging life events, it can be even harder.

Here are some ideas about how to answer children or young people’s questions or respond to their worries. A few general principles in how to do this are as follows:

1. Try to ask a question or two before you respond to a child/teen’s concerns – you may be able to get more information about exactly what they are worried about and therefore answer more helpfully.

2. Express care and sympathy rather than “buck up and deal with it”

3. Answer with a matter of fact, calm and confident voice and facial expression. If you can’t do that, step away and say “I think I might just need some adult time for a moment, and I will come and talk to you again in a few minutes”. Then take some time to talk to a friend/family member/take a deep breath and look after yourself. Then come back to your child/teen and provide some answers.

4. Remember (as you will see below) if children/young people continue asking lots of questions which you have gone over with them before, it’s okay to put some limits on the time you spend talking about it. If it is appropriate, you might say something like: “That’s a problem for adults to solve and there are lots of clever adults working on that right now. You don’t need to spend much time thinking about that”. You might also say something like: “We’ve spent enough time talking about this for now, it’s good for our brains and bodies to have a break from thinking about worrying things and problems, let’s go and do something else”. At this point, gently try to distract the child/teen with another activity.