A friend of mine has a daughter who kept complaining of dizziness. No fever, nothing obvious, just this recurring, unexplained lightheadedness that had my friend understandably worried. They booked a pediatrician's appointment, which is always the right first move. But my friend also had a hunch running quietly underneath the worry: her daughter had been through a lot of change lately, a lot of loss in the small, invisible sense, and this might just be what grief looked like coming out sideways.

That's the thing almost nobody tells you about kids and grief. It rarely shows up looking like grief. It shows up as a stomachache. A headache. Dizziness with no medical explanation. A kid who suddenly can't fall asleep, or won't eat the foods they used to love.

There's no one-size-fits-all guide here. Every kid is different, and you know yours better than any article ever will. But there is a starting point that works no matter their age: how you talk to them about it.

If you want your kids to be honest with you, you have to be honest with them first. If you want them to talk about their feelings, you have to talk about yours.

Think about how many times you've said "I'm fine" when you weren't. Or shrugged off "what's wrong?" with a flat "nothing." We learned to do that because somewhere along the way, someone was dismissive of our feelings, "things will look better tomorrow," or told us how we should feel instead, "you should be grateful for what you have." Statements like that quietly teach a kid it isn't safe to say what's actually true.

If you want your child to feel safe telling you the truth, start by validating whatever they bring you.

It's okay to feel sad. I feel sad too, sometimes. It's okay to feel scared. I get scared too. It's okay to feel upset, frustrated, confused, worried, angry.

Because the truth is, we all feel that way sometimes. That's not a flaw, it's just what being human involves. We're here to feel the entire range, and so are they.

We've talked before about "being strong" being one of grief's biggest myths. It doesn't actually help you complete your own grief, and it definitely doesn't help your kids to watch you perform being fine. All it teaches them is how to bottle things up, numb out, and avoid.

About 80% of communication is non-verbal, which means your kids already sense something's off long before you say a word about it. Left with no explanation, they'll fill in the blanks themselves, usually with something worse than the truth.

So talk about how you're actually feeling, and go first. Talk about what actually helps when you feel that way too, moving your body, music, journaling, a good scream into a pillow, meditating, praying, making something, calling someone you trust, a hot bath. Then invite them to try a few things themselves and see what lands for them.

You can't think your way out of a feeling. You can't fix it either.

Feelings are teachers. They show us what we value, what we believe about ourselves and the people around us, and we learn that by actually listening to them and sharing them with someone we trust. Nobody tries to "fix" feeling happy, safe, or loved. The harder emotions don't need fixing any more than the easy ones do. They need to be felt, heard, and seen. That's what lets us meet the wounded, scared, or heartbroken part of ourselves with compassion instead of judgment.

Your kids need that same compassion from you, so they can eventually learn to offer it to themselves.

Skip the standard openers. "How are you?" "How was your day?" And especially skip the stomach-dropping "let's sit down and talk about this," a sentence that has never once, in the history of parenting, made anyone feel calm.

Instead, go first, in a normal conversational tone.

"This is what I heard on the news today, did you hear that too? What did you think?" "Today was hard, and I felt..." "My favourite part of today was..."

More often than not, they'll offer something back the same way you naturally would in any conversation. Or ask what they learned, what their favourite part of the day was, or what was hard. Because you went first, it stops feeling like an interrogation and starts feeling like a conversation.

Be patient with yourself and with them. This isn't a one-conversation fix. Learning to be honest about how you feel, and learning to ask for what you actually need in the moment, a hug, some space, a walk, is something you both get to practice, a little at a time, for as long as it takes.

If you'd like more support, I have a self-guided grief course built for adults, to help you help the kids in your life navigate their grief. You can learn more about it by clicking here.