Showing normal reaction to grief Vs protecting children from worrying

[TickTickTock]

I was just wondering what people think about being open with reactions to grief around your children. A close family member is really poorly at the moment and as a result I'm very tearful. I've been hiding my tears from the children (7 and 9) because I ddonnt want them to worry, but there is a real chance this person won't pull through this. I want them to know that it's ok for anyone to be upset and cry, and I think it's good for children to see their parents' emotional responses, but at the same time I want to protect them. Where is the balance?

I'm sorry to hear about your situation with your family member. Yes I think it's absolutely fine to cry around your children, and to explain to them that you are feeling very sad because granny is ill or similar. Certainly at their age they will be beginning to develop an understanding of illness and death and IMO it does them no good to have all this 'hidden' from them and treated as something so frightening they can't witness/know about it or worse somehow shameful - children are perceptive and will tend to fill in the gaps for themselves (but not always accurately!) so it's generally better to have a open conversation and address their worries in the open rather than let them make their own assumptions.

Where for me it crosses the line into a concern is where you aren't able to fulfill their needs or keep them in their normal routine e.g. if you are so devastated you aren't able to feed them, get them to school, play with them, that would maybe be the time to enlist some help while you are going through this. Or if you are so overwhelmed you aren't able to reassure them, cuddle them, answer their questions which will naturally come up about why you are sad and so on, that can be unsettling too. Otherwise IME children of that age cope really surprisingly well even with very sad events and bereavements with adults grieving around them if they have the reassurance of their familiar surroundings and routine (so e.g. I always let mine keep going to school and hobbies etc if they wanted to even if it felt more 'natural' to keep them at home), and the adults around them are able to talk openly and in an age-appropriate way about what's going on... maybe do read up a bit on developmental stages of understanding of sickness and death so as to know the best way to answer questions like 'is granny doing to die', 'do we all die', 'am I going to die?', 'what happens when we die' and the like as I do find when you're in the middle of grief and anxiety yourself you sometimes can struggle to find the answers - although it's perfectly OK to say also that you don't know or aren't sure, or that some people think X and others think Y (e.g. about whether we go to heaven when we die) and they can make up their own minds,