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When Loss Comes Early: Supporting Grief Across Every Phase from Childhood to Young Adulthood is a live training created for mental health professionals who want a deeper, more practical understanding of how grief manifests in children, teenagers, young adults, and the families and systems that surround them.
Grief in young people doesn't look like adult grief -- and it rarely announces itself clearly. This training offers a comprehensive, evidence-informed framework to help clinicians confidently recognize, assess, and support loss at every developmental stage, including within foster care and family systems.
During this training, you will learn how to:
Identify how grief is expressed differently across developmental stages: from infancy through young adulthood -- so you can accurately recognize grief even when it looks like tantrums, school problems, withdrawal, or risk-taking behavior.
Apply age-appropriate, evidence-informed interventions tailored to each stage of childhood and adolescence, including play therapy, narrative tools, expressive arts, legacy-building, and life mapping exercises.
Support families navigating grief as a system, understanding how each member's response shapes and reverberates through the whole, and how to facilitate shared meaning-making across divided loyalties and differing grief styles.
Recognize and address the layered, ongoing grief experienced by foster children, birth parents, and foster caregivers -- including ambiguous loss, disenfranchised grief, unfinished business, and the compounding effects of repeated separation and instability.
Work with neurodivergent children and adults in grief, shifting from a deficit lens to a difference-informed approach that honors sensory, behavioral, and routine-based expressions of loss.
Help young clients and their caregivers navigate anticipatory grief, suicide loss, and the unique ethical complexities that arise in end-of-life work with families.
This training is ideal for clinicians who want a stronger developmental foundation for grief work, practical tools they can bring directly into sessions, and a more nuanced understanding of how early loss shapes identity, attachment, and resilience across a lifetime.
Counselors: Private Practice Grief has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7071. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Private Practice Grief is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs.
Social Workers: This workshop has been approved for 4 CE hours by the CAMFT (Approval # 134631).