Grieving for our Pre-teen or Teenage Child

UK Helpline: 0345 123 2304 | www.tcf.org.uk items which are still at the school. If we do not feel ready to do this ourselves, perhaps we could ask a friend to pick them up for us. Hopefully the school will understand that collecting our child’s belongings may be very hard for us. It may be a good idea to choose a time and day when we can have time to ourselves afterwards to recover. We may prefer to ask the school to keep the items safely for a while until we feel able to collect them. In communicating with our child’s place of education, we might want to request that a particular teacher – perhaps a form tutor, or someone else who knew our child well – acts as a single point of contact for us over the coming weeks and months. We may need to communicate with the school about a range of issues such as: • How we would like the school to handle breaking the news and/ or explaining the circumstances of our child’s death. This might involve calling a special assembly, or placing a statement on the school’s website or social media pages. • We may wish to write a short statement about our child’s death for the school to share with the parents in our child’s class or year, to help ensure that other parents know the facts of what happened rather than hearing about it in an ad-hoc manner. This might be particularly important if our child’s death was sudden or unexpected. • We may or may not wish to involve teachers and pupils in our child’s funeral or memorial service; the school may be able to relay this information on our behalf. • In the immediate aftermath of the death, we may or may not wish to receive messages of condolence from teachers and pupils. The school might be able to gather these messages — possibly in a book of remembrance — to pass on to us whenever we feel ready.