Helping Children with Pandemic Grief

August 31, 2020

(New York Times) – Between travel restrictions and limits on visitors to hospitals, parents may get the news of a loved one’s death over the phone and find themselves having to tell children who may be unprepared. At the end of March, doctors in the child and adolescent psychiatry group at Oxford University, led by Alan Stein, published an editorial in the journal The Lancet: Child and Adolescent Health, arguing that honest and effective communication with children about the pandemic, including about death and dying, and about parental stress and sadness, was vital for children’s psychological health and well-being.