How Children Grieve: What Adults Miss, and What They Can Do to Help

Understand how children process grief at every age and stage of development in this accessible guide for parents and caretakers.

An award-winning childhood grief expert shares clinically-informed advice for supporting kids and teens through difficult times--from family deaths and lost pets to unexpected moves, and beyond.

A necessary and impactful guide to understanding children’s grief from the inside and to guiding children through loss, from the death of a parent and other family members, to the loss of friends, pets, and even the family home. Dr. Masur, an award-winning clinical psychologist specializing in grief and mourning, describes how to understand, help, and guide children at each age and stage of development and uses her own childhood experience with loss through empathetic yet clinically informed advice.

When Dr. Masur was fourteen years old, her father died. Like most children and teens facing loss, Masur didn’t know how to handle her grief, and she was never encouraged to acknowledge or share what she was feeling with her family, teachers, or friends. Her experience of shock and emotional paralysis around her loss is what led her to become an expert in childhood grief in order to help grieving children and to help others to support the children in their lives who have experienced loss.

As a psychologist and child psychoanalyst, Dr. Masur has helped many children recognize and express their feelings after loss. In How Children Grieve, Masur shares her expertise with caregivers of all kinds, giving them the tools they need to help a child or teenager mourn, move forward, and make meaning of terrible loss.

Dr. Corinne Masur is a clinical psychologist, a child and adult supervising psychoanalyst and an Adult Personal Analyst at The Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia (PCOP). She works with parents, teenagers and adults, supervises other clinicians and runs a parenting group for mental health practitioners. She is on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia, where she teaches and supervises psychoanalytic trainees. Dr. Masur has published three academic books on the subject of grief. She is a sought after speaker and interviewee.