Grief Lending Library

Separate texts for the adult and child.

• Children

• Helping Children / Historical

Guidelines for assisting adolescents presently struggling with the difficult issues of dying, death and bereavement.

• Helping Children & Teens

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

A tool for parents, grandparents and others to help the children the love understand and appreciate the blessing of feelings. Helps children learn the names of emotions while they study the photographs of children’s facial expressions. They, in turn, can begin to label their own feelings and understand that all feelings are OK.

• Helping Children

Provides a wealth of information on books designed to help children from ages 3 to 16 overcome the grief of loss in whatever form it takes.

• Helping Children

• All Loss

A guide for helping children with complicated grief issues. Includes bibliographical references and index.

• Helping Children

• Complicated Grief

A refreshing and practical approach to working with children who are suffering the loss of a loved one due to suicide. Rubel takes a very difficult topic and creates a manageable path for parents and professionals to follow when helping the young suicide survivor.

• Helping Children

• Suicide

This book will help children and adults understand the deep impact of loss and what it takes to begin to heal. This book will help you and the child you care about to manage their sorrow and begin to move forward.

• Helping Children

• Death of a Parent

The author explains how children and adolescents grieve after someone loved dies. For adults who want to help.

• Helping Children & Teens

Childhood and Death fills the need for a comprehensive source treating the highly sensitive, difficult, and complex issues of working with children in this area. It discusses the various ways in which death affects children and effective intervention techniques to help them cope.

• Helping Children

• Children Dying

Children Also Grieve is an imaginative resource that offers support and reassurance to children coming to terms with the loss of a close friend or relative and to adults who are supporting them through their bereavement.

• Helping Children

This book attempts to identify, illuminate, and broaden our repertoire of adaptive maneuvers so that both children and adults will be better equipped to deal with the crisis of death.

• Helping Children

This book teaches you how to answer your child's questions in specific, practical ways, help your child grieve by supporting his or her God-given emotions. It also teaches you to give your child a sense of security and safety amid disorienting events like funerals, disrupted routines and more.

• Helping Children

Drawing upon extensive interviews and assessments of school-age children who have lost a parent to death, this book offers a richly textured portrait of the mourning process in children.

• Helping Children

• Death of a Parent

Enables anyone who comes in contact with a bereaved child to have greater understanding of a child's grief.

• Helping Children

A readable book directed primarily at caregivers but might also benefit a family dealing with a pediatric related problem of grief and bereavement.

• Helping Children

Focused on the traumatic nature that death presents in children's lives. It also includes a rang over a variety of topics, from supporting children during disaster, through the benefits of death education, to the value of ritual in helping children adjust to a radically altered set of circumstances following loss.

• Helping Children

• Sudden & Traumatic Death

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

• Helping Children

Explores children's evolving views of death; describes and discusses what children themselves think of life and death. Offers guidelines for explaining death to a child.

• 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

Providing a viable alternative to the limitations of the medical model for companioning the bereaved, the author encourages counselors and other caregivers to aspire to a more compassionate philosophy in which the child is the expert of his or her own grief---not the counselor or caregiver.

• Helping Children

An innovative collection of therapeutic games, art techniques, and stories to help children of divorce express feelings, deal with loyalty binds, disengage from parental conflict, address anger and self-blame, and learn coping strategies. Includes a theoretical overview for practitioners, a sample treatment plan, and a reproducible handout to give parents. Also contains a ten-week curriculum that can be used in therapy or support groups.

• Helping Children

• Divorce

A collection of readings to help any reader face death more effectively.

• Helping Children

• Historical

A wonderful resource for helping children understand death, grief, and remembrance, this is the story of a young boy who has been told that he has 'lost' his grandfather. The boy remembers when he himself was lost in the mall and wants to help his grandmother find his grandfather. When he learns that his grandfather is not lost but dead, the boy remembers the old man's kindness, love, and generosity. Material objects then begin to evoke warm memories of his grandfather. This touching story will encourage young readers to discuss their feelings of loss and grief.

• Children

• Death of a Grandfather

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

For helping children cope with the death of a brother or sister.

• Helping Children

• Death of a Sibling

True stories of the faith and courage of children facing life-threatening illnesses.

• Helping Children

• Religious

Designed to help adults who work with groups of children in their efforts to assist surviving children to cope with the emotional stresses with result when a friend dies.

• Helping Children

Offers tools for school personnel to effectively address the needs of grieving children. Chapters include tools to help with data collection, classroom activities, and on-going evaluation of progress.

• Helping Children

• School Resources

A handbook for teachers who this year alone, will deal with more than three million grieving children. Case study, class support for the grieving child, and ideas from counselors who have dealt with a series of deaths. Age appropriate responses included.

• Helping Children

• School Resources

Provides suggestions for dealing with a child's emotional responses (including anger, guilt and depression) and helping a child adjust to a new life after someone loved dies.

• Helping Children

For families, friends and caregivers who want practical, day-to-day “how-to’s” for helping grieving children they love.

• Helping Children

Ideal resource for parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, teachers, coaches and others who want to help a teen in grief.

• Helping Children & Teens

By comparing grief counseling to gardening, the author suggests caregivers embrace a more holistic view of the necessary process of grief.

• Helping Children

Even if children or teenagers you love appear to be doing "just fine" after a loss, the truth is, they may be suffering in silence. They may not even know they need your help. Suzy's simple, straightforward, refreshing style makes helping a child both easy and effective. Her approach works to keep misperceptions, isolation, and sadness from permanently affecting the important children in your life.

• Helping Children & Teens

For young and middle readers (6-12 year olds) grieving the death of someone loved. Age-appropriate activities and gentle, healing guidance.

• Helping Children

The author shows how to teach your child to trust God and celebrate life and to deal with, learn from, and have hope in the face of death.

• Helping Children

• Religious

Focuses on ways to assist adolescents as they encounter loss, grief, and death. Some of the foremost experts in the field share their insights on this critical topic. The chapters examine the variety of losses adolescents encounter and offer ways to support both grieving adolescents and adolescents facing their own life-threatening illness. Voices of adolescents are included in their own words, to best articulate both their perspective on loss and the sources of their support.

• Helping Children & Teens

Drawn from stories, suggestions and insight shared by grieving children and their family members, this book explores how children view, understand and process death; how to talk with children about death at various ages and developmental stages; how to be supportive and helpful throughout their grieving process; and when to seek professional help.

• Helping Children

Focuses on the special needs of grieving children, offers guidelines for effective helping, and lists helpful resources.

• Helping Children

How books and stories can be used to help children grow, to help reduce fears and anxieties, and to initiate open honest communication between children and adults.

• Helping Children

• Historical

Shows how children at various ages understand death and offers positive ways for parents and other caring adults to help them grieve.

• Helping Children

This practical book offers 20 simple rituals that caregivers can use with people with developmental disabilities after a death. All of the rituals can be adapted for people of all age and all levels of disability.

• Professional

• Helping Children & Teens

Addresses issues that arise in the classroom after a death impacts a student, a classroom or a school. Includes practical tips and step-by-step information on what to say and do.

• Helping Children

• School Resources

"The intent of this book is to share the knowledge and experience of a variety of concerned individuals involved in the care of children facing death."

• Helping Children

• Terminally Ill Children / Historical

Provides the straightforward, uncomplicated language that will explain the facts of death to children from two-year-olds to teenagers.

• Helping Children

Through the description of personal experience, and case studies, the book explores how people with autism feel and express the loss of a loved one, how they process and come to terms with their feelings of grief, and offers practical and detailed advice to parents and caregivers on a range of sensitive issues. 

• Professional

• Helping Children & Teens

Explores the major issues and developments from the last decade that affect children today, including the dangers and opportunities of the Internet, a deeper understanding of how hereditary diseases affect children, the impact of the nation's explosive growth in single-parent families, and new insights into how family trauma and a parent’s mental illness may affect children.

• Helping Children

Offers wise comments and effective comebacks to help today's busy and beleaguered parents answer questions, encourage dialogue, explore feelings, and teach values. Each chapter consists of practical, how-to advice based on various scenarios, "Smart Talk" sidebars-new insights to the issues important to parents, and helpful "Rules of Thumb--"short but sweet tips.

• Helping Children

Five or more years after the death of their children, twenty-five families open their hearts and share stories of courage, hope and their attempts to make sense out of the most unbearable loss of all. What did they do to move on with their lives, to make each day meaningful again, to remember their child? In addition to helping themselves, learn how these parents help others and what advice they give to those still having difficulty living in a world without their child.

• Death of a Child

A teacher’s experience in pioneering courses on death and dying for junior students.

• Helping Children & Teens

Look through the eyes of a child again. When something unexpected, disappointing, or traumatic occurs, children feel a very real sense of loss. They may respond with fear or with anger. Most likely they are confused. They have questions they want answered. They need help from their parents or others who care to understand and process their grief. It’s Okay to Cry offers practical help for parents. It explains the symptoms of loss and unresolved grief so that parents can recognize them and walk alongside their children on the path to recovery.

• Helping Children

An outstanding book to help parents explain the idea of death in ways that are understandable to children. Includes sections on the process of grief and ways to help children cope with loss.

• Helping Children

This poignant story, straightforward and honestly told, fills a long-felt need for the parents of children with malignant and potentially fatal disease.

• Helping Children

• Terminally Ill Children

Excellent for parents who want to help their children grieve while grieving themselves. Includes all the information about children and grief, plus includes tools and resources.

• Helping Children

Discusses the questions, fears and fantasies many children experience when a parent or someone close to them dies.

• Helping Children

A guide for parents, educators, clergy and health care professionals to handle children’s loss and grief issues. Includes bibliographical references and index.

• Helping Children

The subject of children and death made comprehensible to parents, relatives, doctors, nurses, social workers, and everyone else concerned.

• Helping Children

Discusses various issues that children and adolescents face before, during, and after the death of a loved one. Also touches on the dying child. Topics that are discussed include developmental perspectives, children’s hospice care, sibling loss, loss of a parent, loss of a friend, and loss experienced by military children.

• Helping Children & Teens

A compilation of writings each dealing with how we can better help children and adolescents cope with grief and loss, including pieces written by grieving children themselves.

• Helping Children & Teens

For adults who know children with major hurts, this book provides a model for support and comfort. It also gives helpful advice about helping kids experiencing difficult situations such as death, divorce, abuse, etc.

• Helping Children

Treating children with complicated mourning and advice for parents. This study on magical thought offers interactive healing techniques, correcting distorted death stories, prescribed therapy, and uniting parents to assist grieving children.

• Helping Children

This book brings together diverse fields of study and offer a practical as well as multifaceted theoretical approach to how children cope with death. Using stories of children’s own experiences supported by data from a large research study, Silverman explains the wide range of effects of loss upon children, the challenges they face as they grieve, and ways of supporting them as they change and grow in the bereavement process.

• Helping Children & Teens

Describes the difficulties parents with dying children must face; offers loving and practical help in handling these crises.

• Helping Children

• Children Dying

Are you looking for ways to better understand the impact of the loss – and how to help? This booklet was written specifically for surviving adults, such as family members, caregivers, and close friends. It might also be of interest to teachers, counselors, clergy, healthcare professionals, and others who work with young people and, most importantly, care about them

• Helping Children

A practical guide and an emotional support for adults and children who have had a pet die.

• Death of a Pet

• Helping Children

Information children need to know during the illness, during the death, and what children need to heal from their loss. Information how children can express themselves, learn about integrating death into their lives and search for new meaning.

• Helping Children

• Cancer

Analyzes the behavior of leukemic children aged 3-9

• Helping Children

• Leukemia / Historical

Ages 5-9. Explores the feelings Sam has after his dad dies. Includes a parent’s guide for helping children cope with grief.

• Children

• Death of a Father

How the very young can and should be taught about death at school and at home. A resource for teachers of the young, as well as for their parents.

• Helping Children

• Historical

This model is designed for a six-week time period.  In other words, the group meets once a week for six weeks.  When groups get stretched out over longer periods of time, participation is often interrupted.  Many people can plan six weeks into their schedules, but beyond that, it may get complicated.  It also means people are not committing to a series of meetings which may never end.   Six Simple Weeks gives you everything you need to know to start a support group.  It includes all the information necessary and a week by week model to get you started.

• Helping Children

• School Resources

For children ages 4 and up. A very personal way to help your child deal with the death of a friend or relative. Includes practical suggestions for parents.

• Children

• Helping Children

In Stepparenting the Grieving Child, Diane Ingram Fromme shares the assumptions and presumptions, steps and missteps that occurred within her own stepfamily. Diane faced the key challenges any new stepparent to grieving children experiences, including helplessness to know how and when to offer comfort, awkwardness to identify the times and ways to memorialize the lost parent, and outsider blues--not only feeling uncomfortable in her own home but also in her own skin.

• Helping Children

• Death of a Parent

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

This short, easy to read book offers simple but important advice and guidance for school teachers and staff on what to do when a child is grieving. It includes advice on explaining death to children, insights into how children may be feeling and how they may react, and ways in which they can be supported. The book also covers how bereavement can affect a child and how it can affect the whole school in the case of a death of a pupil or staff member.

• Helping Children

• School Resources

Explaining divorce and separation to children is difficult. This book gives helpful advice on how to talk about you and your spouse walking separate paths. Includes a storybook section for children and adults to read together. Following is a section for parents to use to open up communication between parent and child.

• Helping Children

• Divorce

Through stories and thoughtful analysis, Maria explains how to handle the difficult job of talking with children and adolescents about loss. Includes information about divorce, Death of a Pet, death of a family member, the disabling of a sibling and more.

• Helping Children

• All Losses

Ages 4-7. For children who have witnessed any kind of violent or traumatic episode. An afterward for parents and other caregivers offers extensive suggestions for helping traumatized children, including a list of other sources that focus on specific events.

• Children

• Witness Traumatic Event

It is a discipleship tool for parents and caregivers in helping children learn that people grieve in many different ways, how to talk about grief, ways to honor and remember a loved one, and how Jesus knows and understands their tears.

• Children

• Religious

An overview of the basic issues; children's comprehension of death, the phenomenon of childhood bereavement, and parental loss.

• Helping Children

• Death of a Sibling

A dictionary of death, dying, and grieving terms for grieving children and those who love them. Gives parents suggestions on how to talk with children about death and dying.

• Helping Children

Widely recognized grief specialist, Harold Ivan Smith, gives practical steps you can take to ensure that a grieving child receives the necessary, healthy outlets needed during the loss of a loved one. If you are the parent, relative, or friend of a grieving child, you can learn to give that child the support he or she needs to survive.

• Helping Children

• After Life

Losing your mother to cancer is never easy, no matter what your age. But for a child, the loss is incomprehensible. The time together, special experiences, and memories are much too abbreviated. Perhaps the most difficult of all, is the loss of a mother's love. The Little Pink Book™ series explores cancer through the eyes of a child using whimsical stick characters and an unpretentious storyline. Death and loss are not easily talked about, yet they are events that all of us must eventually face.

• Children

• Death of a Mother

An activity book for a child and their caregiver to do together to help facilitate grieving a death together.

• Helping Children & Teens

Death is hard enough for adults to accept. For children, the experience of loss can be overwhelming. In this concise, practical guide, grief counselor Huntley offers principles for helping children of all ages understand death, work through predictable "tasks of grieving," and take steps toward healing and acceptance.

• Helping Children

Covers a wide range of questions and concerns to help us guide children through trials and time of loss.

• Helping Children

• Death of a Grandparent

This book will help children see how much god loves them and how God works through people to provide comfort and hope. They are not alone in feeling afraid.

• Teens