Our culture is notoriously neglectful when it comes to teaching our children about grief, loss and change. In a day and age in which technology rules, the meaning and importance of dealing with the aftermath of massive changes is left to pure chance.

In particular, the death of a loved one is a universal experience. Everyone grieves, if they have any sort of emotional investment in the person who died. Given the fact that loss is a continuous and ongoing part of life (we grieve for many losses other than the death of a loved one), taking the taboo off of expressing emotion and openly grieving, is essential. It would eliminate much unnecessary suffering.

We can start reversing the trend by helping our children balance the negative cultural view about grief. What can we teach our children about grief, and about the universal response to the loss of something valued? Here are five concepts to be developed and discussed with them.

1. Grief and suffering are inevitable. Everybody has to deal with massive changes in their lives since everything constantly changes and ends. No one likes to dwell on this fact of life. Likewise, the fact that suffering is bound to occur and must be faced, is consistently sidestepped. But change and suffering do cycle into and out of life, and should not be considered anything other than a condition of human existence.

2. Grief (the internal process) and the way we mourn (the external process) is highly individual. No two people respond to loss in the same way. The reason is that no two people have an identical emotional investment or relationship with the person who died or the object of loss. This is critical to understand in families. Grief and mourning naturally will differ.

3. The entire process of loss, grief, and adaptation to a new environment without the person or object of loss, is natural. Grief is a normal human response, not in any way, shape, or forms a sign of weakness. We are built to release the emotions we generate by expressing them through the grief process. It is healthy to grieve our losses, and it takes much time and patience to do so.

4. Grief is a response to love. We are made to love and help each other. Love is the most powerful force in dealing with life in all its manifestations. It is particularly painful to have a loved one no longer physically present and when that person dies a part of us dies. However, love lives on; it never dies (something every child should learn). Grief automatically flows from our love, although its outward expression cannot fully capture the love it represents. Choosing to love means choosing to grieve; they are very much intertwined.

5. Grief teaches us much about life and about ourselves. We learn the importance of appreciating quality interpersonal relationships, helping others, understanding the way we express our feelings, and how to go about reinvesting in life. We often learn to view the world in a new way. Grieving is a developmental experience because we learn many things, not the least of which is to appreciate the little things in life.

Teach children about grief by talking the above five concepts, and using the terminology that best fits your listeners, help them to understand the normalcy of sadness and the healing path of love. Be willing to cry in front of children when it is normal to do so given the situation. We can become positive grief models for the young and in doing so save them much unnecessary suffering.

Dr. LaGrand is a grief counselor and the author of eight books, the most recent, the popular Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Encounters of the Bereaved. He is known world-wide for his research on the Extraordinary Experiences of the bereaved (after-death communication phenomena) and is one of the founders of Hospice of the St. Lawrence Valley, Inc. His free monthly ezine website is http://www.extraordinarygriefexperiences.com