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From the loss of school connections during the pandemic to the death of a grandparent, sometimes well-meaning adults misstep as they try to help grieving children.   

“I think we can get a little clouded around making ourselves feel more comfortable rather than kind of accompanying the child where they are,” says Lacy Finn Borgo. Her 2022 children’s picture book “All Will Be Well: Learning to Trust God’s Love” is written to help children face loss and grief. “So we might say things that make us, as adults, feel better, but it might not meet the child where they actually are.” 

Borgo emphasizes that, with God, we can know that all will be well even when someone we love dies. But how do we help children see that “all will be well” does not mean that “everything will be the same as it was”? “Children and even adults, we can’t sort of get our minds logically around that. We learn it and we live it a little bit every day.” Borgo says. “We can know it in our heads, but learning it in our souls and our bodies are something else.”  

What we can do for children—and this helps with adults as well—is to help them feel secure right now as they express their emotions, long before it feels like “all will be well.”  

“So making space for them to have a place to talk about how they feel, and accepting the emotions, and giving them a place and a way to process them, helps them to know that all will be well,” she says.   

Learn more about Lacy Finn Borgo’s book “All Will Be Well: Learning to Trust God’s Love.”