Helping a child with grief: what to say, and what they understand at each age

This is the single piece of advice that changes the most, and it is the one that feels hardest. The NHS guidance for bereaved families asks for "direct, honest and open communication" and warns against trying to protect a child through deception. In practice that means the plain words: died, dead, body. Not lost, not passed away, not gone away, not gone to sleep.

The reason is not bluntness for its own sake. A child under five does not yet understand that death is permanent, so they take the sentence literally. A child told that Grandma was lost may quite reasonably want to know who is looking for her, and when they will find her. A child told that she went to sleep may decide, sensibly, to stop going to bed. A child told we said goodbye may wait for the next hello.

You will feel brutal saying it. You are not being brutal - you are being comprehensible, and to a small child those are the same kindness. Expect to say it more than once.

Child Bereavement UK sets this out by age band, and it is worth knowing before you start talking, because the same sentence lands completely differently at three and at seven.

Under two, there is no concept of permanence at all. What registers is absence, a broken routine, and the state of the adults in the room - which is why so much of the advice for this age is really advice about looking after yourself.

Between two and five, death is understood as reversible - something like sleep. Your child will ask when the person is coming back, and they will ask again after you have explained it clearly, and again after that. The repetition is not a sign that you explained it badly. It is how a four-year-old checks whether a rule has changed yet.

Between five and eight, permanence starts to land, sometimes alongside stranger ideas - that death is a person, or that it might be catching. This is frequently when it gets harder rather than easier.

The consequence most parents are never told: a child bereaved at three will grieve it again at seven, because at seven they understand it for the first time. That is not a relapse and it is not something going wrong. It is the same loss, met by a bigger mind.

Young children reason magically, and the bereavement literature is consistent that a preschooler may quietly conclude that a death was punishment - for something they thought, or said in temper, or did not do. A child who once shouted that they hated Grandpa can carry that for years.

So say it out loud, unprompted: nothing you did, or said, or thought, or forgot to do made this happen. Say it early, and say it again in a month. Most children never ask the question, which is exactly why it has to be you who raises it.

It arrives in bursts. A child can cry hard for ten minutes, then ask for a biscuit and go back to the floor with their toys, and both halves of that are real. Adults grieve in a long weather system; small children grieve in short showers, and the gaps between are not denial.

They will also put the death into their games. The NHS describes this plainly as a way for children to make sense of what has happened, so a funeral staged with soft toys is a child working, not a child being macabre.

And "seeming fine" is not the same as being fine - but on its own it is not a warning sign either. The thing to watch is not the absence of tears; it is a change that settles in and stays: sleep that does not come back, a child who stops playing, a child who will not let you out of the room for weeks. That is the point to phone someone.

For most children in this country the family animal is the first death they ever meet, and it does a great deal of work: it is a real grief and it is also a rehearsal, at a scale a small person can manage.

Two things make it harder than it needs to be. The first is "put to sleep", which carries exactly the problem described above and is worth avoiding for the same reason. The second is replacing the animal quickly. A new puppy the following week teaches a child that the ones we love are interchangeable, which is not what anybody meant to teach.

We do not make a book about a person who has died, and we are not going to. The books we make have exactly one hero, illustrated from a photograph of your child - so the person you have lost cannot be in it, and a story that gestured at them without showing them would be worse than nothing.

What often does come apart after a death, in a small child, is the ordinary machinery of the day - and bedtime first. A story with your child in it is a bedtime thing: it is a reason to sit in a chair together at the same time every night, in a week where very little else is at the same time. That is a much smaller and more ordinary claim than the one you were probably hoping to read, and it is the honest size of it.

If what you actually want is a book about the person who died, the right answer is a memory box or a photo book that you make yourself, and Child Bereavement UK has free guidance on both. That is a better thing than anything we sell, and we would rather say so.

Child Bereavement UK is the charity to call. It supports bereaved children and young people up to the age of 25, and their parents and families, and it also supports families when a child dies. Winston's Wish, which many people will remember as the other name in this field, merged into it - so it is now one organisation rather than two.

Their freephone helpline is 0800 02 888 40, and they offer live chat and email support as well. Opening hours are listed on childbereavementuk.org - we have deliberately not reprinted them here, because a wrong time on a page like this sends someone to a silent phone.

If you are worried about your child specifically rather than looking for general guidance, your GP and your child's school are both real routes to help, and school is the one parents most often skip. A teacher who knows what has happened at home can change a child's week considerably.