· Elizabeth Spencer
1. Don’t hurry them past what they feel.
As parents, we yearn to heal what is sick, mend what is broken, and right what is wrong. When our children are hurting, we want to ease their pain immediately, if not sooner. But there are times we must let our children walk through—not around—what Ecclesiastes 3:4 calls “a time to weep” and “a time to mourn.”
Be patient with your child while they process the new reality they’re facing without their friend. Resist the urge to brush off their sadness by telling them they have other friends; friendship is not like a scale where as long as the balance of friends stays the same, all is well.
2. Give them good medicine.
The day my tween officially found out about her school friend’s departure, she was scheduled to help out at a class function. I took her to it, hoping the activity would distract her from thinking about the loss. But she was bored at the event and had plenty of time to think. On the way home, her face was heavy with sorrow, and I mentally scrambled through all my mom’s tricks to figure out what I could do to help her.
A few minutes after we walked in the door, my older daughter called to her sister from our family room, “Come out here! I have to show you something!” My heavy-hearted girl went to her sister grudgingly, but I heard them both howling with laughter within a couple of minutes. My firstborn had dug up an old camera she hadn’t used since her pre-cell phone days and had hooked it up to her laptop to play a slideshow. While my girls watched old modeling videos they’d made and flipped through pictures of their elementary-age selves, they laughed and laughed and laughed. From the other room, I could scarcely reconcile the sound of my tween’s delight with the despairing look I’d seen on her face a few minutes before.
Later, my older daughter asked me, “Did you hear how I had her laughing? I knew those pictures would do it.” I loved how her idea beautifully proved the wisdom of Proverbs 17:22: “A cheerful heart is good medicine.”
3. Help them glimpse the future.
If, as was the case with my daughter, friends have moved on from the places in life where your child is used to seeing them, you can commit to helping them maintain the thread of connection. Soon after the day when my daughter knew for sure she was going to lose her best school friend from her school setting, her mom emailed me, asking if we could schedule some time for our girls to spend together. She said she wanted to give her daughter “something to look forward to in the near future.” Smart mama. We made the date, and I promised there’d be more to come: weekly dinners or doughnuts before school. Sleepovers.
You can also direct your child to think of activities or events apart from friendship they can plan for and look forward to—a family vacation, perhaps, or a personal goal they’re working to achieve. Here again, the idea is not to rush them through their pain or grief but rather to introduce hopeful factors to provide balance while they’re in it.
