Grief, a Natural Part of Life

According to experts, these key grieving points apply to children and adolescents:

• Long-term denial of death or avoidance of grief is unhealthy for children and may resurface later with more severe problems. (NMHA, 2006)
• One child in 20 will have a parent die before he or she graduates from high school. (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1990)
• One of every 750 youth of high school age dies each year.
• Many children are more at risk for emotional and behavioral difficulties two years after the death of a parent then they were one year after the death. (Harvard's Child Bereavement Study)
• Statistics show that one child in every seven will experience the death of an immediate family member-mother, father, brother, sister, grandparent by the age of 10. (The Children's Bereavement Center of South Texas, 2005)
• It is estimated that 73,000 children die every year in the United States. Of those children, 83 percent have surviving siblings. (Annie's Hope the Bereavement Center for Kids, 2005)