Do you talk about death and grief with your children?
In my vast experience with death, dying and the resulting grieving process, I have noticed a common thread among just about every family I encounter. They do not include young children in their grieving process. They either go out of their way to 'protect' the little ones in their lives by hiding the truth of it with false smiles and placating sentiments, or they completely ignore the process altogether leaving the child alone with his or her imagination.
There are many reasons for this behavior and we have convinced ourselves that this is the kindest thing to do, but when is lying to a child ever the best way?
We seem to forget that children are 'born knowing'. When they arrive into this world they come with all the knowledge they'd gained from previous life cycles as well as a strong connection to the other realms and dimensions they existed in before agreeing to drop into our physical world. It is here, by the average age of 3 years, that they 'forget' all of that Soul knowledge and begin to live from a place of Ego-mind, reacting only to stimuli from the physical world around them.
How many of you can remember your small children telling wild stories of "when they used to be big like Mommy" (remembering a past life cycle?) or "Grandpa just told me" (when Grandpa has been dead for years)? How do you respond to these encounters that our society has dubbed 'the imagings of a child'? Do you immediately try to convince the child these things are only in their imagination?
So many of us have done this for so long, generations really, that we have made it a habit to convince our kids that those things are not real, not understanding that we are effectively shutting down our children's natural ability to accept painful circumstances in their lives.
"When left to their own imagination, children often assign blame to themselves for Mommy being sad all the time."
