The purposes of our education materials are to provide:
- A foundation for people to understand healthy bereavement and
- Information about circumstances when additional resources might be helpful.
Though most children/teens have within them the ability to grieve, they often receive messages from well-meaning relatives, teachers, school counselors and medical professionals that they are not grieving properly, that they are not doing it the right way. Children/teens are often told they should get over the death quickly. Children/teens may be told it's time to get back to their school work or they may be accused of using their grief as an excuse not to do school work or chores. A child/teen who has a delayed grief response may be labeled a troublemaker because he lashed out at a classmate on the second anniversary of his mother's death - an anniversary that no one else in school knew about or considered still relevant. As a result of these misguided messages, many children/teens perceive their grief and how they are experiencing and expressing it as somehow wrong. This leads to feelings of isolation which can lead to unhealthy bereavement. One of the primary goals of our education materials is to normalize the relatively common experience of childhood bereavement.
Our educational materials provide people in our target audiences with information that will help them understand the nature of bereavement so that they can provide an environment that supports the complex realities of grief as a process of adaptation. Target audiences include:
Maternally Grieving Children
Maternally Grieving Teens
Surviving Fathers and Family Members
School Counselors/Staff
Health Care Providers
Bereavement Support Professionals
Social Service Providers
Spiritual/Religious Advisors
Funeral Directors See also Funerals.
