Few experiences are more difficult to witness than a grieving child. Adults often feel helpless, uncertain of what to say or how to provide comfort. Yet, as clinician and grief expert Cynthia White has shown through decades of work with bereaved children, grief in childhood follows its own unique patterns. It is rooted not in words or reasoning but in the body, energy, and movement. I recently spoke with Cynthia, and her insights continue to shape how I understand loss and healing in young people.
Cynthia’s “quantum model” of grief reframes the experience as something energetic rather than simply emotional. Grief, she explains, moves through the body like current through a circuit. It can be expressed, redirected, and transformed, but it cannot be made to disappear. For children, this energy is often revealed through behavior, play, and physical activity rather than verbal expression. When adults allow children to move, create, build, or simply exist in safe spaces, they provide a channel for this energy to flow. When that movement is blocked by silence or suppression, the grief turns inward and may surface as anxiety, illness, or anger.
One of Cynthia’s most important messages is the value of honesty. Out of a wish to protect children, adults sometimes withhold the full truth about a death, especially in painful circumstances such as suicide or overdose. Yet children quickly sense when something is missing, and secrecy breeds confusion and mistrust. “Children can handle the truth,” Cynthia told me. “What they can’t handle is not knowing.” Sharing the truth with compassion helps children integrate the loss into their story, rather than leaving them outside it.
Cynthia also emphasizes that grief evolves with development. Young children, whose thinking is concrete, often struggle to grasp the permanence of death and need patient, repeated explanations in clear language. As they grow, their understanding deepens, and grief takes on new meanings: missing a parent at graduation, wishing they were present for life’s milestones. Grief never truly ends, she explains, but continues to change shape as life unfolds.
At the heart of Cynthia’s work is a deep respect for children’s natural wisdom. They already know how to grieve, but they need adults to provide consistent, predictable environments where it feels safe to do so. Through her nonprofit Kids Hurt Too Hawaii and her book Everything That Happens Is Right, she continues to teach that grief is not a disorder to fix but an expression of love seeking release. When we meet children with honesty, safety, and compassion, we not only help them heal but learn something profound about our own capacity to heal as well.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Aaron Kaplan:
Cynthia, welcome to the show.
Cynthia White:
Hi Aaron, thanks for having me on. I’m really happy to be here. This is such an important topic that we’re going to talk about today—about grieving in children. It’s a tough one.
Dr. Kaplan:
I know. Anybody who’s been in clinical practice like me—and of course like you, as this is an area you specialize in—knows how tough it can be when we’re dealing with kids, children, young children, adolescents, teenagers who are grieving the death of a loved one. I’m really curious to hear some of your thoughts about this subject and kind of dive in because it’s so important. To begin with, I’d really like to learn a little bit more about you and your background. Tell us about yourself.
Cynthia White:
Okay, well, I was abandoned by both parents, separated from five siblings, and went into foster care when I was six years old. Then I was reunited just with my mother when I was eleven. Growing up, nobody ever asked me how I was doing. Nobody ever talked to me about anything. My mother always said, “Don’t tell anybody,” because she had a lot of shame over losing her children—and it was all because of domestic violence. Before all that separation happened, I had a very profound experience.
When I was six, I was a curious child and used to wander—back in the day you could wander around—and I loved to look at buildings. One day I saw this big building with white columns, and I thought, what is that? I had to cross a four-lane boulevard to get to it, but I didn’t care. It was a hot day, traffic was loud, and all I wanted to see was that building. I stepped into the road and, in that moment, all sound stopped. The cars were gone, the birds stopped singing, the wind stopped blowing. I felt a presence that I knew was God. The presence said, “Everything that happens is right.”
When you’re six, you take those things as a matter of fact. I just said, “Okay.” I crossed the street, went to the building—it was a church—and they invited me to come back on the weekend for Bible school. I went back home, and that night or the next day, we were abandoned and separated. That message—“everything that happens is right”—stayed with me. I used to repeat it through all the abuse I went through in foster care. I would say, there must be something right about this.
Then, as a teenager, I thought, this isn’t right. I was bullied. War wasn’t right. Back then, during Vietnam, I thought, that’s not right. I was angry. How could everything that happens be right? As a young adult, I became interested in religion, psychology, and philosophy because I wanted to understand that message. When I went to college, those were the topics I studied, and I came to realize it was a message of unconditional love—not about right or wrong.
I wanted to work with dying people because I felt no one should die alone. I worked in a nursing home where people were left alone to die, and that upset me deeply. I used to go sit with them and talk to them, and I got fired because that wasn’t my job. My job was in the kitchen. But that made me want to do something with my life so people wouldn’t die alone. I understood that deep loneliness. My third job out of college was Executive Director of Hospice. That was back in the 1980s. I worked directly with patients and started doing peer support groups with children. Around the same time, the Dougy Center—the National Center for Grieving Children and Families—was just starting in Portland. We started with volunteers who worked with grieving kids, and the feedback was so powerful. They’d say, “They’re all saying the same things—let’s get them together.” So we did. I got Dr. David Lippman to volunteer and run the meetings with me. The kids loved it. It was amazing. Even adjudicated boys in group homes wanted in—we started with three and ended with ten. That’s how I began doing group work with grieving children.
Later, I moved to Oregon and became Training Director for the Dougy Center. I went all over the country teaching people how to run grief groups for kids. I did that for seven years, then went to Japan to study Japanese children grieving the death of a parent. After that, we moved to Hawaii.
Dr. Kaplan:
You’ve got quite a background—starting with hospice, then children’s grief work, and eventually Hawaii, where you founded Kids Hurt Too Hawaii. Tell us about that.
Cynthia White:
When my husband and I arrived in Hawaii—he had been a volunteer at the Dougy Center too—we wanted to see what was happening locally. He entered the MSW program at UH, and I called St. Francis Hospice and spoke with their bereavement coordinator, Felicia Marquez Wong. She remembered me from when I had come to Hawaii in 1995 to do a training for the “Forget Me Not” program. She was thrilled I was here and invited us to volunteer. At the time, there was only one children’s grief group at Hospice Hawaii. We helped with that and then I was asked to be lead counselor at a grief camp supported by the Girl Scouts and the Richards Foundation. After that, we gathered community members from child and family services, hospices, and anyone working with grieving children to form an advisory council. Over months of discussions, I designed what became Kids Hurt Too Hawaii. We started with one group in Nanakuli, borrowing space from Queen Lili‘uokalani Children’s Center. Then we opened one in Kāne‘ohe. We worked unpaid for about ten years, borrowing church and nonprofit spaces. Eventually, in 2009, we moved into the Kukui Center, where the organization still is today.
Dr. Kaplan:
It sounds like you built it from the ground up—a classic bootstrap story that became a lasting, meaningful organization.
Now, I believe you’ve published a book called Everything That Happens Is Right: A Quantum Model for Grief Work with Children. Tell us about that.
Cynthia White:
The title comes from that childhood message I received—“Everything that happens is right.” The book introduces a new theoretical framework for understanding childhood grief and trauma. It offers practical tools usable across settings and integrates cultural perspectives. I wrote it because I’d been teaching these ideas for thirty years, and everyone kept asking, “Where can I read about this?” So I finally wrote it down. The book is now published—it’s available on online bookstores and my website, and I’ll be doing book signings.
Dr. Kaplan:
Let’s talk more about grieving in children. Clinicians are familiar with adult grief models, but what are the key differences between how children and adults grieve?
Cynthia White:
Stage and phase theories don’t work well with children. Those models teach adults how to grieve, but I realized we need to learn from children how they grieve.
Children are concrete thinkers—they understand what they can see, hear, or touch. Adults grieve more abstractly, imagining future losses. Children grieve the moment. Their grief is physical, not mental.
They need comfort, support, and connection—but in grieving families, everyone needs those things, so it’s unclear who provides them. That’s why children’s grief is so different: they experience it in their bodies, through movement, play, and behavior.
Dr. Kaplan:
You’ve talked about the somatic and energetic dimensions of grief—the body, the energy inside. Can you explain that a bit?
Cynthia White:
Yes. I see grief as energy—either potential or active. Like a battery, it’s always there, but becomes active in a context. Say a child’s father has died. When that child sees another child with their dad, the grief energy activates. It shifts the child’s state of consciousness—it becomes experiential, embodied, transformative. Change itself is a loss, and grief is the energy of change. The more connected we were to what was lost, the more intense the grief. Children in foster care, for instance, experience astronomical levels of change. That’s why their grief often turns traumatic—because trauma takes precedence. You can’t grieve if you’re traumatized; you have to address the trauma first. In our program, we create a safe context where children can experience themselves as grievers. That’s the missing context in most of society.
Dr. Kaplan:
That makes sense. So in practice—when you’re working with children—what does that look like?
Cynthia White:
Every child is unique. I first observe where their energy is moving. Then I offer safe choices—activities that match the energy in their body. If we don’t give them safe options, they’ll find unsafe ones. So we emphasize safety, predictability, and consistency. We start every group with clear rules: no hitting, no put-downs. We use the “I pass” rule—children can choose not to share. That actually makes them feel more comfortable, and ironically, they end up sharing more. Our job as adults is to provide a safe container, choices, and unconditional acceptance—as long as what they’re doing is safe. They can rip up a teddy bear, punch a pillow, whatever helps move that energy safely.
Dr. Kaplan:
You mention “co-created reality” in your book. What does that mean here?
Cynthia White:
It means we’re all creating reality together—right now, you and I are co-creating a shared reality. The same happens in grief groups. Children learn they’re not alone. They meet others who’ve lost someone too. They realize, I’m not the only one. That changes everything. It creates a new reality of belonging and connection.
Dr. Kaplan:
That’s powerful. How about differences across development—say, younger children versus teenagers?
Cynthia White:
Very young children don’t understand the permanence of death. They might ask repeatedly, “When is she coming back?” They need concrete language—don’t say “gone to sleep.” That creates fear around sleep. Say “dead,” gently but clearly. As they grow and their brains mature, they begin to grasp that death is permanent, and that ushers in a whole new phase of grief. Around ages eight to ten, kids become curious about the body—what happens to it—and may ask disturbing-sounding questions. It’s developmentally normal. By adolescence, grief becomes more abstract. Teens begin imagining future losses—the graduation, the wedding, the parent not being there. Adolescence itself is a grieving process—a series of losses and transformations—so grief during that time can be very complicated.
Dr. Kaplan:
If a child loses someone early, does that grief evolve as they mature?
Cynthia White:
Absolutely. Grief never ends—it changes. A three-year-old might say, “Why isn’t Mommy here to make my lunch?” At six, it’s “Why isn’t she walking me to school?” At eighteen, “Why isn’t she here for graduation?” The content changes, but the grief remains part of who we are.
Dr. Kaplan:
For parents, teachers, and caregivers—what are some practical ways to best support grieving children?
Cynthia White:
First, adults must get support for themselves so they don’t collapse when their child brings up the loss. It’s okay for children to see you cry. Hiding your grief teaches them to hide theirs. That isolates everyone. Be honest. Children can handle the truth. What they can’t handle is not knowing. When adults withhold information—especially about causes of death like suicide or overdose—it breaks trust. I always tell parents: tell the truth, as soon as possible, in age-appropriate language. A child can handle the facts far better than confusion or secrecy.
Dr. Kaplan:
That’s something clinicians hear often—parents unsure whether to tell the child that the death was by suicide. You’d say always tell them?
Cynthia White:
Yes, 100%. Children depend on trust. Withholding truth jeopardizes that relationship. Once trust is broken, it’s hard to rebuild. I’ve had countless cases where once the child was told, their anxiety dropped dramatically. They could separate from the parent, participate, and share. Knowing the truth restores safety.
Dr. Kaplan:
What signs should adults look for when children are grieving but not verbalizing it?
Cynthia White:
Behavior is the key. Grief is a natural, healthy response to loss, and children communicate through behavior, not words. If their behavior changes—especially if it becomes unsafe, isolating, or out of character—that’s a red flag. If a child was outgoing but now withdraws for more than six weeks, or expresses thoughts of wanting to be with the deceased, that needs assessment. Even if it’s just missing the person, we always check for safety.
Dr. Kaplan:
You’ve worked across different regions—Kentucky, Oregon, Japan, and Hawaii. What cultural similarities or differences have you noticed in how children experience grief?
Cynthia White:
Across all cultures, the need is the same: a safe place to express and process. But culturally, we’re still a grief-denying society—especially regarding children. People still pathologize grief instead of recognizing it as a normal part of life. In Japan, I found children grieved much like American children. The main difference was that when Japanese children learned group rules—like no hitting, no put-downs—they practiced them everywhere: home, school, life. In America, kids see rules as situational. Also, Japan—and Hawaii too—have more cultural traditions for honoring the deceased. Western culture has largely lost that. Indigenous and Eastern traditions teach ongoing connection with loved ones who’ve died—through altars, stories, rituals. That continuing bond is profoundly healing. Here in Hawaii, I’ve been deeply influenced by that. “Aloha” means face to face, sharing breath. When we come together in grief, we share our spirit—our ha. Grief shared is strength shared.
Dr. Kaplan:
That’s a beautiful way to end—thank you, Cynthia. This has been a moving and insightful conversation, and I know it will help a lot of people better understand how to support grieving children.
Cynthia White:
Thank you for having me. It gives me so much joy to share this work, because I know it helps children—and when you learn it, you can’t unlearn it. You’ll know what to do.
Dr. Kaplan:
Beautifully said. Thank you again, Cynthia.