Working to prevent isolation: the Shared Grief Project

There is a growing chorus of thoughtful people advocating for grieving children, and they are creating relevant childhood grief support tools!  It feels so potent to be sharing excellent resources.

The Shared Grief Project is working to help mitigate one of the greatest risks for grieving children and teens, the problem of isolation.  Unless they are part of bereavement support groups, it seems to bereaved kids 'everyone else has a normal family'.  Grieving teens want to be like everyone else, to be normal and 'not weird'.   I recently heard someone say we spend all our teen years trying to be like everyone else, and as soon as we graduate high school it flips, and we just want to be different and stand out.  (Isn't that the truth!)  Experiencing a death close to you does forever change you, sets you apart.  Among the multitude of social pressures teens have to deal with, add to it the pain and strain of death, and the pressure seems insurmountable.  The Shared Grief Project works to help children and teens mitigate the problem of isolation.  These short videos are an excellent tool to share in bereavement support groups, or to view privately.

The mission statement from the Shared Grief Project website reads,
"The Shared Grief Project was founded on one guiding principle: grieving children should not suffer in isolation. Through short videos featuring interviews with high-profile celebrities, the Shared Grief Project highlights the stories of individuals who have lost a parent or sibling at a young age and have gone on to live happy, healthy, and highly successful lives. The goal of the Shared Grief Project is twofold: first, to demonstrate to grieving children that they are not alone, and second, to provide inspiration and encouragement to these children by showing them how some of their role models have experienced grief in their own lives and sharing the lessons they have learned."

http://thesharedgriefproject.org

Copyright (2014) Suzanne Bayer. All Rights Reserved.