Welcome to NFRC Online

Welcome to the National Family Resiliency Center’s new online community! As a nonprofit mental health center (formerly the Children of Separation and Divorce Center, Inc.), we help children and parents through family transitions. We’re very excited to be able to enhance the support we provide to our online “family.”

Having worked with more than 23,000 family members over the past 24 years, we have a vast amount of experience and knowledge. We have the gift of our peer counselors - children, teens and adults who have also been through family transitions and want to give back and volunteer their time to reach out to others. You’ll meet some of them as our online neighborhood unfolds.

Our center and staff are dedicated to helping families experience a healthy family transition so that children can remain “kids” and not be “children of divorce,” and that you as adults can move forward with your lives without rage, anger, guilt and self/other deprecation.

We'd also like to tell you more about another online resource: Family Connex, a self-paced parent planning program customized for your blended family. Visit www.familyconnex.org for details, and we'll be talking more about this important resource in future blog entries and podcasts.

We sincerely hope that our new online connection will not only be valuable to you but will create new connections with many others out there like you who deserve, welcome and benefit from support.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Helping Children and Teens to Grieve

For most parents experiencing a family change such as separation, divorce or the disengagement of an adult relationship with children, seeing their children in emotional pain as a result of such a change is very difficult. It is hard to reconcile that parents may have made a decision that is good for them but hurtful to their children. Grief is a process that we all experience when we lose something such a person, situation or event.

To grieve means to mourn the losses of what we once had:
  • The picture of the family we thought we would have forever
  • Financial security
  • Seeing children and children seeing their parents every day
  • Family traditions
  • The family home
  • Extended family and friends
  • Feeing safe and protected by parents
Children, like adults, experience a roller coaster of emotions: profound sadness, anger, confusion, worries, fear, relief, denial. How do we help children cope with grief and come out of it feeling a sense of hope?

Children are egocentric; explain what changes are about to take place or have taken place in language they can understand.

Teach children to express their feelings and allow them to in age appropriate ways, through stories, puppet shows, books, music

Reassure children that their lives will remain as stable and secure for them as possible: they can bring their favorite blanket and toys from one home to the other

Allow children access via phone and or email when away from one parent

Refrain from badmouthing other parent, allow child and parent to have a close relationship

Permit children to recollect memories from the past; it validates children’s feelings

Help children through transitions from one home to another: quiet times in rooms, taking a walk together

Accept that you may be at one point in the grief process, your child another

You and your child could also benefit by journeying through NFRC’s Family Connex, a parenting plan that helps families at their own pace. Visit www.familyconnex.org for more information.
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