Grief is a natural experience, and is considered one of the most stressful life events a person can experience. 1 in 14 children under the age of 18 will experience the death of someone close to them. Every year, approximately 200 000 children are grieving the death of someone in their extended family or community. Grief doesn’t stay at home: it follows children throughout their life, and into the classroom with 1 grieving child in every other classroom in Canada. When grief impacts a community, support for grievers of all ages is important. Children’s grief is often misunderstood due to myths about grief. This toolkit curates our content by healthcare professionals and those who experienced the death of a loved one between the ages of 6-12. It is our hope that this toolkit will empower adults in a grieving child’s community to support themselves and grieving children in their lives through loss.

Toolkits are becoming increasingly popular as a knowledge translation strategy for disseminating health and wellness information, to build awareness, inform, and change public and healthcare provider behaviour. Toolkits communicate messages to improve health and wellness and in changing practice to diverse audiences, including healthcare practitioners, community and health organizations, and policy makers.

Our children’s grief and loss toolkit pulls together our original multi-media resources about grief into an easy-to-access format which provide helpful information about the grief experience, stories of childhood experiences of loss, and helpful strategies to move through grief. This toolkit has been curated by mental health professionals for other helpers, for individuals, and their networks as they navigate grief and loss together. They are free to download and use.

You can download the toolkit here.

As a virtual organization, we envision a world connected and supported in grief through our free multimedia library of content. Grief Stories relies on donations to cover many operational costs, including content creation. If you, or someone in your life has found our content or toolkit helpful, please consider making a donation to Grief Stories (suggested amount $10).