Never Too Young to Know

In spite of society's wish to protect and insulate children from death, the experience of loss is unavoidable and there is surprisingly little guidance on how to help children cope with grief and bereavement. Never Too Young to Know: Death in Children's Lives is the first book to bring together diverse fields of study and offer a multifaceted theoretical approach to how children experience death. Using stories of children's own experiences supported by data from a large research study, Silverman explains the wide reange of effects of loss upon children, the challenges they face as they grieve, and ways of supporting them as they change and grow in the bereavement process. The book is divided into three parts including an overview and theoretical framework, a detailed analysis of how children experience mourning different types of death (including the death of siblings, parents, and other family members, death due to illness, suicide, accidents, and violence, and how children cope with the grief of widowed parents), and an accessible guide to helping children cope with grief. This book is not only valuable for Psychology and counseling courses on death and dying and the family, but also for Social Work courses dealing with children both at the upper undergraduate/graduate level. In addition, this is a wonderful book for the general public readership who are dealing with death in their children's lives.