Grief Lending Library

This book focuses on how to help children and teens in the aftermath of a parent’s suicide. The book provides an overview of current thinking/research on suicide and explores the increased risk of mental health issues for child survivors. In addition to information about how children grieve at different developmental levels, it also offers comfort to the bereaved, specific coping strategies for families facing this trauma, and insight into what promotes resiliency.

• Helping Children & Teens

• Suicide

The Dougy Center and American Foundation For Suicide Prevention created this helpful book discussing children and teen suicide loss.

• Helping Children

This guide provides hundreds of hands-on activities tailored for grieving children in three age groups: preschool, elementary, and teens. Through the use of readings, games, discussion questions, and arts and crafts, caregivers can help grieving young people acknowledge the reality of the death, embrace the pain of the loss, remember the person who died, develop a new self-identity, search for meaning, and accept support.

• Helping Children & Teens

Ages 9-16. A realistic guide to coping with the stresses and emotions a child or young teen may face when a parent has died.

• Children and Teens

• Death of a Parent

Simplified and suitable methods for talking to children and teenagers about sensitive topics with an emphasis on the subject of death. Honest but child-appropriate language is advocated, and various wording and levels of explanation are suggested for different ages when discussing topics such as death in general, suicide, homicide, accidental death, the death of a child, terminal illness, pet death, funerals, and cremation.

• Helping Children & Teens

Ages 10-13. Children speak openly, honestly, unreservedly, of their experiences and feelings

• Children and Teens

• Death of a Parent

For children ages 4 and up. At her grandmother’s beach cottage, Annie reveals her father’s sexual abuse of her to a dove who helps her heal and learn to trust again. Lists guidelines for adults to help sexually abused children.

• Children and Teens

• Abuse

Ages 6-13. A warm, sensitive story of how one little boy is encouraged and supported to find his own way to remember his best friend. Written in simple, honest language, and the warm, expressive watercolors tenderly express the sensitive story of children’s friendships.

• Children and Teens

• Death of a Friend

Since his mother was killed in the line of duty in Iraq, Derrick is building a doomsday shelter to prepare for the apocalypse when he makes friends with Misty, the girl next door.

• Children and Teens

• Death of a Parent / Military

A reader friendly guide to helping children. Includes: supporting grieving children and teens, signs of grief in children and teens, what you can do, teachable moments, and taking care of yourself. Information that will help parents and their grieving children.

• Children

A reader friendly guide to helping children. Includes: supporting grieving children and teens, signs of grief in children and teens, what you can do, teachable moments, and taking care of yourself. Information that will help schools when a death in the classroom occurs.

• Children

• School Resources

A self-help guide for teenagers who are struggling with bereavement and the emotional difficulties it presents. This book provides an overview of grief as a painful but normal process, offering insights from bereavement experts as well as practical suggestions for coping with loss, including accounts from teens. This book closes a gap in the available literature on grief and bereavement that has tended to focus on adults and younger children. It provides a warm, accessible resource that will reassure teen readers about the normality of grief, encourages their understanding of what happens during the grief process, and provides an indispensable resource guide.

• Teens

Activities promote healing when they are offered freely and when the children and teens can choose their level of participation. Activities don't heal; they create an atmosphere of warmth, comfort and safety, which allows the child and teen to work through the healing process. The goal of these activities is to promote the sharing of feelings, to normalize the grief experience and to encourage peer support.

• Professional