By LINDSEY WHISSEL FENTON, MEd, CT
Special to The Gazette
CENTRE COUNTY — In Pennsylvania, one in 11 children will lose a parent or sibling before they turn 18. That’s roughly 246,000 children — each carrying the weight of grief into their homes, classrooms and communities. Yet most of us never learn how to navigate loss, let alone how to support someone who is grieving. The gaps around grief literacy are a public health issue hiding in plain sight.
But grief isn’t something to fear — it’s a normal, developmental experience, and how we navigate it plays a vital role in our emotional, physical and cognitive health. Mental Health Awareness Month reminds us that making space for grief can be a powerful way to promote overall well-being.
Grief is natural and healthy. But when we don’t understand it — or avoid it — grief can become isolating and harmful. For kids and teens that harm can be especially profound. Childhood bereavement is the strongest predictor of poor school outcomes, even more than abuse. Many youth in detention facilities have lost a significant person. When grief goes unacknowledged, kids suffer. Families suffer. Communities suffer.
That’s why it’s critical we equip adults with the tools to recognize and respond to grief in healthy, supportive ways. WPSU’s free Learning Grief resources are designed to help educators, caregivers and community members do just that — because building grief literacy is a public health investment we can all make.
For some kids, grief isn’t just unsupported — it’s punished. Researcher Tashel Bordere coined the term suffocated grief to describe what happens when young people, especially from marginalized communities, are penalized for expressing normal grief reactions.
A child acts out after a sibling dies and is suspended. A grieving teen withdraws after a parent is incarcerated, and their behavior is labeled defiant. These responses aren’t just unfair, they’re dangerous. And they’re preventable. Often, they stem not from cruelty, but from a lack of understanding, especially of how grief shows up in children and teens.
At WPSU, we’ve made grief literacy a cornerstone of our commitment to serving Central Pennsylvania. Our Emmy-nominated initiative, Speaking Grief, funded by the New York Life Foundation, helped spark national conversations about grief. Now, with support from the Imagine Learning Foundation, we’ve launched Learning Grief — a free resource to help adults model and teach grief literacy to kids and teens. It offers practical tools for families, educators and youth-serving professionals, including classroom-ready content through PBS LearningMedia.
Learning Grief addresses death-related grief but also includes experiences like family estrangement, divorce, foster care transitions and pet loss. That distinction is intentional. By widening our lens, we normalize grief as a response to many forms of change — and invite more people into the conversation, cultivating the skills young people need to navigate loss with empathy and confidence.
Some people may (understandably) worry about burdening young minds with “tough topics.” But here’s the thing: it’s not if grief — it’s when. Loss is inevitable. And kids are already encountering grief through movies, news and social media. But much of what they see is distorted in media — it technically shows the experience, but in a way that’s unrealistic and detached from real life.
That’s why we need to view conversations about grief the same way we do with other tough topics: even if it’s uncomfortable, we do it anyway, because it’s essential for healthy development. The question isn’t whether kids will learn about grief. It’s who will teach them: misinformed peers and sensationalized media or knowledgeable, compassionate adults?
Despite the clear need, grief education isn’t built into most school systems. Only a handful of states have mandated grief literacy in schools. Pennsylvania isn’t one of them (yet). Until that changes, we must rely on institutions like public media and community-led efforts to fill the gap. That’s what makes initiatives like Learning Grief so essential.
In our region especially, this work is urgent. Rural areas often lack grief-informed services. Schools and nonprofits are stretched thin. The need is growing faster than the systems that exist to meet it.
The good news? We don’t need to be trained counselors to make a difference. Grief literacy isn’t about having the “perfect” words (spoiler alert: there aren’t any). It’s about showing up. It’s about learning how to recognize that what looks like acting out might actually be grief. It’s about demonstrating to young people that their pain has a place, and that they don’t have to bear it alone.
That work starts with us, because we can’t raise grief-literate kids without becoming grief-literate adults. That means confronting our own discomfort, learning how grief really works and modeling hard conversations. When we start teaching grief literacy early—when we create communities where it’s safe to feel, to remember and to grieve — we lay the foundation for resilience, empathy and the capacity to thrive.
You can help.
Start by building your own grief literacy. Reflect on your experiences. Get more comfortable with the conversations you may have once avoided. Then, share what you learn with a teacher, coach or youth leader. Start a conversation with the kids and teens you care about.
Free tools are available at learninggrief.org to help you take that first — or next—step.
Grief may be universal, but turning toward it in meaningful ways is something we have to choose, again and again.
Let’s make that choice together.
This guest essay was written by Lindsey Whissel Fenton, MEd, CT, who is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, grief educator and senior producer/director at WPSU, a PBS/NPR affiliate. Certified in thanatology, she creates multiplatform projects that promote grief literacy, including Speaking Grief and Learning Grief. She serves on the board of the National Alliance for Children’s Grief and presents internationally on grief education and media strategy. More at lindseywhisselfenton.com.
