Counseling Grief & Bereavement in School Aged Children

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School counselors may provide counseling services in three areas: educational, career, and personal/social. Their services and programs assist students to resolve emotional, social, or behavioral issues and facilitate them to develop a clearer focus or sense of direction. Effective counseling programs are important to the school climate and a vital part in improving student accomplishment. Among those topic areas are the discussions of grief and bereavement for school-aged children.

According to an article released by St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children “By the time children complete high school most will experience the death of a family member or friend, with 5% of children experiencing the death of a parent by 16 years of age.” (no date, p.1). In Luciano Sabatini’s book, Bereavement Counseling in the School Setting (2012), he writes that there are over 2 million children that have experienced the death of a parent under the age of 18 in the United States alone. Not mentioned in that figure are the accounts of the loss of other family members within the household, such as siblings or stepparents (Sabatini, 2012). A study conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Census, in 2000, showed that 4 percent of single parents were widowed, and of that percent 14 percent included households with children under the age of 12 (Black ,2005, ). In 1990, a survey was conducted that showed, “that more than two-thirds of students had encountered a death that had an impact on them and over one-third had attended a funeral within the past year.” (cited in Servaty-Seib, Peterson, & Spang, 2003, p. 170). Sabatini (2012) goes on further to explain that, “in the typical classroom chances are that one or two students have suffered the loss of a close f...

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...d, S. (2009). When Death Affects a School Community. District Administration, 45(6), 24.

Sabatini, Luciano. (2012). Bereavement Counseling in the School Setting. Omaha, NE: WriteLife, LLC.

Schonfield, D. (2009). Responding to Bereavement and Loss. National Harbor, MD: U.S. Department of Education: Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools.

Servaty Seib, H.L., Peterson, J., & Spang, D. (2003). NOTIFYING INDIVIDUAL STUDENTS OF A DEATH LOSS: PRACTICAL RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL COUNSELORS. Death Studies, 27(2), 167.

St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. (n.d.). Guidelines for responding to the death of a student or school staff. Retrieved from: www.cincinatichildrens.org/school-crisis

Winter, E. (2000). School Bereavement, Educational Leadership, 576(6), 80.

Wolfelt, A. D. (1995). Helping grieving children at school. Bereavement Magazine, 10-11.

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