Traditional theories of childhood grief have largely relied on stage-based developmental frameworks, often linking children’s understanding of death to age-related cognitive capacities. Such approaches may imply that children grieve in predictable, normative ways, thereby overlooking the child’s individuality, relational context, and lived experience. This module challenges these assumptions by introducing a Transactional Developmental Model of childhood grief, which conceptualizes children as active agents rather than passive recipients of loss.
Central to this training is an in-depth case study based on a 45-minute video recording of a clinical play therapy session with a five-year-old child and her father following the death of the child’s mother shortly after childbirth of her younger sister. The video will be viewed in segments and regularly paused to invite reflection, discussion, and clinical inquiry. Learners are guided to observe how children express meaning through play, narrative, and relational interaction, and how adult caregivers can be thoughtfully involved in supporting the reconstruction of the death story. Using the Transactional Developmental Model as a guiding framework, the case study illustrates how children’s grief unfolds dynamically within relationships and contexts. Issues of diversity are addressed by attending to family systems, relational positioning, cultural assumptions about children and death, and by explicitly centering the child’s own voice and agency throughout the clinical process.
