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Hi, this is Janet Landsbury. Welcome to Unruffled.

Today I'm going to be talking about a topic that I guess is controversial,

and that is this idea of letting children grieve.

I know that letting a child feel something can be misconstrued

as we're just ignoring them while they're sad and we don't care and you're kind of

of abandoning them emotionally while they're upset. It's weird, it's that word let and

if we exchange it with the word allow it can have a different

connotation right it sounds like oh this is a kind of a privilege we're

allowing our child to experience an uncomfortable

feeling that's very much a part of life and letting them express it to us

without trying to change it or

distracted or cheer them up or tell them they shouldn't feel that way.

They don't need to feel that way.

That's what I'm going to be talking about today.

Because like every feeling under the sun and every feeling in the darkness as well,

grief and loss are extremely healthy for us to allow ourselves and our children to experience and express fully, to share.

And we could say this is especially important for children because they're in the building stages of emotional health.

They're building the foundation for these capacities to experience every type of feeling and know that it's

healthy, that it passes. They don't have to be afraid of it. They can have the feeling of being scared, but they don't have to be afraid of it. They can have the feeling of being scared, but they don't have to be afraid of the feeling itself.

So it's important that we try to do this for them if we believe this.

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