Nobody Taught Us How To Put It Down

Watch a toddler for five minutes and you'll see someone who instinctively knows how to complete an emotion. They cry when they're upset. They rage in the form of a full-body tantrum. They seek comfort in whatever arms are closest. Nobody teaches them to do any of this. It's already in there.

Then society steps in.

We decide tantrums are unacceptable, but we rarely show kids a constructive way to actually express the rage underneath one. "Use your words" doesn't complete the stress response cycle a body needs to move an emotion through and out. Little boys in particular get taught early that crying is off-limits, because men are supposed to be tough and stoic instead.

Then we hand down the same myths we grew up with. It'll get better with time. If you're going to cry, go to your room. Be strong and soldier on.

So the losses start piling up in childhood, one rock at a time into an emotional backpack nobody ever teaches them how to unpack. And because we don't know what to do with all that unprocessed grief, we just keep carrying it, year after year, until we're exhausted, anxious, and less able to cope with whatever comes next. Not because something's wrong with us. Because nobody ever showed us how to put the backpack down.

Grief Shows Up Younger Than You'd Think

Grief is really just the conflicting feelings caused by the change or end of a familiar pattern. Framed that way, you start noticing how early loss actually enters a kid's life.

The lost binkie, blanket, or bottle. A friendship that quietly ends in middle school. Not making the team. The death of a pet or a grandparent. And the more intangible losses too, a home routine that disappeared, a holiday that felt different, a birthday that didn't happen the way it was supposed to.

What losses do you remember from your own childhood? Were you ever actually taught how to process them? Most of us weren't, which is exactly why this conversation matters. Imagine, for a second, a world where tough emotions were welcomed instead of dismissed. Where we listened deeply to each other and held each other's pain with compassion, no judgment, no fixing, just honouring what's actually there. That starts with how we teach kids to hold their own grief.

Here's a general guide to how that shows up by age, keeping in mind grief is never actually linear or tidy.

Ages 4 to 9

Magical thinking is common at this age, kids can believe their own thoughts or wishes caused something to happen, and can feel irrationally guilty or responsible for a loss like divorce. They may be curious about death, or personify it as a monster or a ghost. Grief often shows up as frustration or anger (giving up on homework fast) or as regression into behaviours you thought they'd outgrown. Sleep disturbances and appetite changes are common, and they may not fully grasp that death is permanent.

What helps: symbolic play, through stories and drawing. If you're seeing real changes in behaviour, loop in a medical professional.

Ages 9 to 12

By this age, kids understand death is final, but like a lot of adults, still don't quite believe it applies to them. Understanding that finality can bring up a new fear, that a parent or caregiver might die too, and depending on the relationship, that can show up as clinginess or as distance. They know how to express their feelings and may choose not to, nobody wants to be labelled sensitive, so "I'm fine" often just means feelings gone underground. Watch for shifts at school, social or academic, or withdrawal from friends. Sleep and appetite disruptions are common here too. Kids this age can also be given real input into funerals, memorials, or how to mark birthdays and anniversaries for someone they've lost.

STERBS: The Steam Valve

Kids, and plenty of adults, lean on STERBS, Short-Term Energy-Relieving Behaviours, because they're easier than actually feeling the feeling. Think of a kettle: heat builds and builds until the steam finally shoots out the spout.

In kids, that can look like an angry outburst at a sibling that seems to come from nowhere, hours lost to video games the way we binge a show, sneaking junk food, or suddenly refusing a food they used to love. None of it is really about the sibling, the game, or the food.

A child's age, temperament, and relationship to who or what was lost, plus the reactions of the caregivers around them, all shape how their grief actually shows up.

What You Can Actually Do

Kids are sponges. They absorb what we do far more than what we say.

Listen. Tell the truth. Let feelings be a normal, natural response instead of a problem to solve.

And go first. Model an honest conversation about your own feelings, whatever loss or stress you're actually carrying right now, big or small. Model learning something new. Model knowing when to step back. Model asking for help, and accepting it graciously when it's offered. Talk about how you take care of your own mental health, and invite them to try what works for you, or help them find their own version of it.

When it comes to death specifically, share your favourite memories of the person you lost, so your kids know it's safe to bring them up too, and ask for their favourite memories in return.

There's nothing here to fix. No emotion is a bad emotion, they're all meant to be felt, seen, and heard. Our grief deserves compassion, not avoidance, and so does theirs.

It starts with us. If we want to build a world with more love and less silence, if we want to help our kids unpack their own backpacks instead of just adding to them, it starts with the awkward, honest conversations we're willing to have right now.

If you'd like support becoming a grief coach for the kids in your life, my introductory, self-guided Children and Grief course walks you through exactly how to navigate these conversations, at any age, with any loss, and gives you tools you can hand straight to your kids.