For and About Grieving Teens and Children

Updated Artwork and Text! 

Dr. Wolfelt’s coloring book for kids ages 3-8 explores many of the feelings grieving children often experience. The expressive, easy-to-color drawings clearly depict disbelief, fear, anger, loneliness, happiness, sadness, and other normal grief feelings. And the simple text accompanying the drawings (”Someone I love has died;” “Ever since this person died, I have felt new and scary feelings. Grown-ups call these feelings grief;” “Sometimes I feel all alone;” “Sometimes I hurt inside”) provides grieving children with words to describe their new, sometimes scary feelings.

Healing Your Grieving Heart for Kids is for young and middle readers (6-12 years) grieving the death of someone loved.  The text is simple and straightforward, teaching children about grief and affirming that their thoughts and feelings are not only normal, but necessary.  

In this informative, easy-to-read booklet, Dr. Wolfelt explains how children and adolescents grieve after someone loved dies and offers helping guidelines for caregiving adults. An excellent, concise resource for parents of grieving kids.

Teenagers often don’t want to talk to adults—or even to their friends—about their struggles. But given the opportunity, many will choose the more private option of writing. Many grieving teens find that journaling helps them sort through their confusing thoughts and feelings.

Yet few journals created just for teens exist and even fewer address the unique needs of the grieving teen. In the Introduction, this unique journal—written by Dr. Wolfelt and his 14-year-old daughter, Megan—affirms the grieving teen’s thoughts and feelings and offers gentle, healing guidance. The six central needs of mourning are explained, as are common grief responses. Throughout, the authors provide simple, open-ended questions for the grieving teen to explore, such as:

• What do you miss most about the person who died?
• Write down one special memory.
• Which feelings have been most difficult for you since the death? Why?
• Is there something you wish you had said to the person who died but never did?
• Describe the personality of the person who died.

Designed just for grieving teens as a companion to Dr. Wolfelt’s bestselling Healing Your Grieving Heart for Teens: 100 Practical Ideas, this journal will be a comforting, affirming and healing presence for teens in the weeks, months and years after the death of someone loved.

Written by and featuring Dr. Wolfelt, this 40-minute video on teen grief contains in-depth information and compassionate advise. Throughout, Dr. Wolfelt’s teachings are interspersed with comments from actual bereaved teens.

While divorce is common, it’s also very difficult for children, eliciting many challenging feelings. This coloring book for kids 7-12 gives them 100 simple ideas for expressing their emotions during this life-changing time so that they can go on to lead happy lives and develop healthy relationships of their own.

How do you help children whose parents are separated or divorced?  While divorce represents a signifigatn loss for children - a loss that creates all the many natural feelings of grief, the children can continue to thrive if they are helped in these 100 practical ways by the caring adults in their lives.  

This colorful, oversized poster helps grieving kids understand their feelings and empowers them to mourn in healthy ways. A compassionate gift for any bereaved child old enough to read. The contemporary design and straightforward-but-notcondescending text also make it appropriate for grieving teenagers. 

One spring morning a gardener noticed an unfamiliar seedling poking through the ground near the rocky, untended edge of his garden . . .

So begins the parable that sets the tone for this inspiring, heartfelt classic for caregivers to bereaved children. By comparing grief counseling to gardening, Dr. Wolfelt frees caregivers of the traditional medical model of bereavement care, which implies that grief is an illness that must be cured. He suggests that caregivers instead embrace a more holistic view of the normal, natural and necessary process that is grief. He then explores the ways in which bereaved children can not only heal but grow through grief.

Illustrated throughout with specially commissioned photos of children by fine art photographer Patrick Dean, Healing the Bereaved Child also contains chapter after chapter of practical caregiving guidelines:

• My Guiding Model: Growth-oriented Grief Gardening with Bereaved Children
• Mourning Styles: What Makes Each Child's Grief Unique
• Sad/Scared/Mad/Tired/Glad: How a Grieving Child Thinks, Feels and Mourns
• How the Bereaved Child Heals: The Six Reconciliation Needs of Mourning
• Grief Gardening Basics: Foundations of Counseling Bereaved Children
• The Grief Gardener's Tools: Techniques for Counseling Bereaved Children
• Grief Gardening and the Family: A Systems Approach to Healing the Bereaved Child
• The "Cold Frames" of Grief Gardening: Support Groups for Bereaved Children
• The Child's Garden: Helping Grieving Children at School
• Grief Gardening in June: The Grieving Adolescent
• The Grief Gardener's Gazebo: The Importance of Self-Care 

Part textbook, part workbook, part meditation, this exhilarating guide is a must-read for child counselors, hospice caregivers, funeral directors, school counselors and teachers, clergy, parents—anyone who wants to offer support and companionship to children affected by the death of someone loved.