Children develop resiliency by facing challenges. Every developmental milestone is a challenge. Reaching a developmental milestone involves lots of attempts and a whole lot of fails. Think: sitting up, then walking, then toilet training. If your child has special needs, then within their abilities are other milestones, but the same cycle applies. Few, if any, get it the first time.
Loss and death are challenges, too.
After your miscarriage, though you may not have spoken about it much, you may discover your child preoccupied with a toy they broke or a bug they squished. They may reach toward a dying flower, then look to you for a reaction. How will you respond?
Children have the uncanny ability to capture the purest essence of loss with a word or expression. They are in touch with their sadness. They let it show, unfiltered and without apology. And that is good. Deep down, something important is being worked out. A kind of groundwork is being laid for resilience around loss—how to approach it, react to it, talk about it. That something may directly or indirectly have to do with your pregnancy loss.
What’s important is that your child is processing the loss of something valuable to them. They may pick up on your melancholy. They may be too young to know what really happened, but they are processing.
Processing is the only way to deal with grief. By extension, talking about the bug that died and the flower that wilted helps them understand the cycle of life at a deeper, more intuitive level. As their parent, you can help them mediate these feelings by reflecting them back to your child. This is what healthy mirroring means. Likewise, if your child begins to say negative things about their own sadness, you can gently mirror that sadness is natural, okay, and what we feel when something we like or love goes away.
As your child gets older (and this could occur days or years later), they may wonder or ask about that time you were sad when they came back from their first day of kindergarten, or why you drove to doctor on Christmas Eve when no one was sick. Though they didn’t know the details—that was the day of your last ultrasound or the night you began spotting—their psyche picked up on something out of place.
When this happens, stop and reflect back to your child what you heard. These are good conversations to have when you are coloring or playing. Be curious about their memory and respond according to their age and ability to understand. If they tell you they are sad or mad, use your mirroring skills. “Wow, thank you for sharing your feelings. You really helped me understand how you felt. I feel that way, too, sometimes. Do you know it’s natural to feel that way when you lose something?”
These interactions help children build resilience by providing context and support to understand loss and ways to manage the feelings related to losing something they love.
This post was written by Meredith Resnick.
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