It can often be tricky for adults to know how to best offer their help to a child who is grieving a sibling, let alone a parent. Here, experts weigh in.
In the wake of the tragic helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, much of the media focus has thus far been on Vanessa — Kobe’s widow and now-bereaved mom, who must not only grieve over her husband and child, but “be the strong one,” as a source recently noted, for her three surviving daughters.
Of course, with the multiple-loss trauma of Kobe and Gianna, not to mention their friends, the situation is heartbreakingly specific. “I think the focal point will be ‘Kobe Bryant’s gone,’” says Horsley, whose own brother died many years ago in a car accident, at age 17, along with their cousin. “But the family has lost a child sibling, too.”
“Teenage years are the hardest”Because she’s Kobe’s oldest daughter, 17-year-old Natalia — as compared to Bianka, 3, and Capri, just 7 months — will bear the brunt of the grief, particularly over her sister Gianna. And that loss might be compounded because of her age, Horsley, author of Teen Grief Relief, explains.
It can often be tricky for adults within a bereaved family’s support system to know how to best offer their help to a child or adolescent who is grieving a sibling, let alone a parent. But according to Horsley, it shouldn’t be impossible. That’s one of the reasons it can be hard for some grown-ups to know how to best comfort bereaved children, according to Cacciatore. “If one of the siblings is preverbal or doesn’t have good articulation skills, then it’s not likely they will be able to communicate, ‘Look, I’m really hurting here,’ in a way that adults can understand,” she explains. Instead, she says, the expression of grief tends to be more behavioral, and should be paid attention to.
It’s the less expressive families that concern her most, she says, “because the child’s narrative is shut down, and their capacity to share is shut down, because the family system style is avoidant — pictures come off the wall and get put away, children are explicitly forbidden from talking about the person who died. And that’s really deleterious in the long term.”
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