Participants creating memory jars using salt and pastels to help remember a loss
So no mindfulness with the kiddies this week, but for very good reason. This week myself and 60 colleagues from ESF and wider took part in brilliant workshops on child bereavement and the management of critical incidents, run by Sarah Gothard a psychologist and bereavement counsellor who works with Winston's Wish http://www.winstonswish.org.uk/ the Uk's leading Child bereavement charity.
1 in 29 children in the UK will have suffered a significant bereavement of a parent or sibling before they are 18. Thats just over 3%, yet death remains conspicuously absent from school curriculums in both primary and secondary phase. If our aim is to promote the development of resilient children should we not help to prepare them for one of the most constant and powerful factors they will experience in life: The death of someone close to them.
Conveying an understanding of how death may affect someone, and giving strategies to help is a relatively simple proposition, yet in perhaps misguided attempts to protect children, the topic is taboo, and avoided in most schools, until something serious forces the school to address it.
So what help do bereaved children get in Hong Kong? and how many children are bereaved on a yearly basis? I don't know the answer to this yet but as one of my primary colleagues said in a takeaway from monday: 'Im going to find out and do something about it'
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