One out of seven children will experience the death of a parent or sibling before the age of 25 and 90% of children will experience a significant loss before graduating high school. The statistics are sobering, but they also call for preparedness. Professionals and adults alike are often at a loss when supporting a grieving child. Talking to adults about death and grief is difficult; it's all the more challenging to talk to children and teens. The stakes are high: grieving children are high-risk for mental health adversities, including anxiety and depression. Yet, despite this, grieving kids can grow-up to become healthy adults. Supporting grieving children requires intentionality, open-communication, and patience. Rather than avoid conversations on death or pretend like it never happened, normalizing grief and offering support requires us to be in-tune with kids, engage in open dialogue, and create a nurturing environment as they grapple with questions of "how" and "why" someone has died. When listening to grieving children, we often have to embrace the mystery, offer love and compassion, and stick with the basics. With practical tools, up-to-date research, humor, and reflection, facilitate healing and create a safe space for children’s age-appropriate grieving. Joe Primo is the CEO of Good Grief and a leading voice on grief, mourning and building resilience in children, families, and communities in the face of loss and adversity. An international speaker, author and commentator, Joe serves on the Boards of Option B at the Sheryl Sandberg and Dave Goldberg Family Foundation and Vennly, an audio-focused spiritual health app.  Primo has served as national spokesperson for the Funeral Service Foundation's Youth & Funerals Initiative and is a past president of the National Alliance for Grieving Children. His TEDTalk, "Grief is Good" reframes the purpose of grief.   Joe received his Master of Divinity degree from Yale University, where he concentrated in end-of-life care.  He later served as a hospice Chaplain at both The Connecticut Hospice and The Hospice of Southeastern Connecticut. Primo has appeared in or on CNN, NY Times, The Chicago Tribute, FOX, ABC, The New Jersey Star Ledger, NJ Spotlight, The Times of London, NPR, and elsewhere. What Do We Tell the Children? Talking to Kids about Death and Dying By Joseph M. Primo Abingdon Press Copyright © 2013 Abingdon Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4267-6049-5 Contents Acknowledgments............................................................ixPrologue...................................................................xiiiIntroduction: A Caregiver's Perspective....................................xxi1. Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First.......................................12. Kids Feel, Too..........................................................113. Myths...................................................................294. Components of a Child's Grief...........................................535. What Do We Tell the Children?...........................................816. Listening without Lollipops.............................................1037. On Death and Lying......................................................1138. A Cultural Rebirth......................................................121Notes......................................................................129 CHAPTER 1 Put On YourOwn OxygenMask First Before we can proceed to talk about children and their grief,we need to know our own grief story. Our interactions withgrieving children, our presence and responses, are skewed by manyvariables: our age, previous losses, religious beliefs, cultural heritage,and, of course, our profession and social role. It is important to understandthese prejudices because they will influence our expectationsof how a child should grieve or what a child's grief looks like.This is true for each of us, and unless we are willing to dive into ourown grief experience and reflect on our grief story, we will not be ableto identify those feelings and discomforts that affect our perceptionof other people's stories. Through our own careful examination ofour fears, preconceived beliefs, deaths, disenfranchised grief, and theways in which each of us achieves emotional safety through ideas thatcan become rigid beliefs that are not applicable to everyone, we areable to better support the bereaved, especially children. When I train facilitators of children's support groups, I neverstart the training with children's grief, even though that's the subjectthe facilitators have signed up to learn about. We never dive right intochildhood development or what grief looks like for a kid. Instead, Idress up like a flight attendant and take out a mock oxygen mask."When this thing spirals, folks, you've got to put on your oxygenmask first. Then you can help the child next to you." Well, thatmakes sense to everyone. We all need to breathe, and it