How to Help Your Child Lament
Navigating Loss with a Child
What is the hardest thing you’ve ever had to say to your child?
“I can’t fix this.”
“Those hurtful words from a friend really stung, didn’t they?”
“Your friend is moving to a new house, and it’s really far away.”
“I’m so sorry, Daddy has died.”
Painfully, in my own motherhood, I’ve had to say all these things to my daughter, and my heart deeply aches for the day when I will no longer have to explain horrible things to my child. Like you, I urgently wait for Jesus to restore all things, but until that day, we will continue to walk through pain alongside our children.
No matter how hard we try, our kids are not exempt from suffering in this life. All children everywhere face loss of many kinds. They know what it’s like to lose a precious possession or a dear friend. They have experienced hurt hearts and scraped elbows. They have felt betrayal and harsh words. And many children will experience the death of a parent, sibling, grandparent, friend, or another important person.
There are many ways we can help our children navigate loss, and one of the graces we can give our children in their pain is lament. Lament helps them find comfort and hope in the God who made them, saved them, and always hears them.
He Always Hears
Alyson Punzi
In this poignant picture book, Jane faces challenges when her seemingly perfect life takes a difficult turn. With the help of her parents, she learns how to lament and make her pain known to God.
For your own sake, learn how to lament.
When we are teaching theological truth, it’s important our words are rooted in our own relationship with God and a desire to grow in Christlikeness. This is normative for discipleship in general—that our discipling is an overflow of our own growing in the Lord and his word. It’s especially hard to teach our children when our own hearts are hurting, and lament is a hope and a grace we must first taste before inviting our children to participate.
This doesn’t mean we have to have all the answers before we help our children. In fact, lament is a comfort to us exactly when we don’t have answers. As grownups, we can help our children lament while we are still wrestling with the horrors of accidents, acts of violence, natural disasters, terminal diagnosis, or chronic illness. When was the last time you asked God a question like the lament psalms do?
“How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps. 13:1)
Lament gives us the invitation to honestly tell God how much it hurts to live in a broken world, without pretending that the deep darkness isn’t actually so dark. It is a worshipful response to the pain of this world to go to our Creator and Savior, pouring out our own hearts before him. If you’ve never sat with this language, I encourage you to take some time and meditate on lament throughout Scripture, especially the psalms.
The hope of lament is for us, not just our children.
How do you explain this to a child?
It can be a daunting task to consider all that Scripture says on suffering, death, and lament and teach that to our young children. Our goal is to use simple language that does not reduce truth to something it’s not.
Lament is crying out to God about what it feels like to live in a broken world.
When God made the world, he made it perfect. But when the first people sinned, our world broke. Because our world is broken, we lose things we love and people we love. Because we are broken, we don’t love God or others like we should. It’s sad to live in a broken world.
But God promised to fix all the brokenness. God the Father sent God the Son to come and rescue us from our sin and make us new. Jesus came and died so that we could be forgiven of our sin. But Jesus didn’t stay dead. He rose to life again, defeating death.
Everyone who believes in Jesus has their broken hearts made unbroken in him.
Lament gives us the invitation to honestly tell God how much it hurts to live in a broken world.
After Jesus rose from the dead, he returned to heaven and promised that one day he would come back and fix all the brokenness. Everyone who loves him will live with him in a new, perfect world, where nothing and no one will be broken again.
But for now, while we wait, our world is still broken. This is where lament helps us hope and provides us comfort. Lament is different than just complaining about how bad something is because we are crying out to God himself. We cry out to him because he made us, he saved us, and he promises to make all things new.
Scripture gives us many examples of lament, including Jesus himself crying out to God while on the cross.
We, too, can cry the lament of Psalm 22:1–2:
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.”
We can lament like this because of the hope in verse 24,
“For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.” (Ps. 22:24)
God is with us, and he always hears our cries.
This language may be helpful to you, but it is certainly not the only way to explain such complex topics.
Walking with our kids through lament is loving to them.
We want to fix it. We want to answer all their questions. We fear that talking too much about horrible things will raise questions for which we will never have answers. And if you have a child like mine, acknowledging one question tends to lead to a cascade of a hundred others. Sometimes it feels like I’m making her pain worse when I acknowledge its presence.
But it is loving to acknowledge our children’s hurting hearts, even over a broken toy or a broken friendship. Kids are resilient, but they are not unaffected by loss. Sometimes things are so hard that the most loving thing we can do for our kids is hold them tight and weep with them. We weep with them as Jesus wept when Lazarus died. His heart hurt alongside Mary and Martha, and he reminded them of truth, that he himself was life (John 11:1–44.)
So we hold them tight and cry with them to the God of all comfort (2 Cor. 1:3–4).
This is not an easy job. Lamenting with your child may be the hardest thing you do as a parent.
But grownup, this is your hope too. God is with you. He hears your cry. As you rehearse in your mind the words you are going to attempt to say to your child, he is holding you too.
We are pointing our children to our God who is good, who loves us, who is sovereign. The God we are pointing our children to is the God who is strengthening you even now as you seek to faithfully walk with your child through whatever hurt looks like for them in this life.
We can even cry out to God in lament that we even have to have these conversations with our kids.
So we walk alongside our hurting children, helping them to cry out to God about how much it hurts, because he is with them, and he always hears their cries.
Alyson Punzi is the author of He Always Hears: A Story of Loss and the Hope of Things Made New.
Related Articles
4 Questions about Our Suffering
Why are we to rejoice in our suffering? Why do we suffer in the ways that we do, and why do some suffer much more than others? Why doesn’t God usually answer our prayers for him to end our suffering?
To Cry Is Human, but to Lament Is Christian
Every human being has the same opening story. Life begins with tears. It’s simply a part of what it means to be human—to cry is human. But lament is different.
Podcast: How the Hope of Heaven Changes Us Right Now (Matt McCullough)
Matt McCullough discusses how the hope of heaven fights temptation, resolves anxiety, and makes suffering purposeful.
Podcast: How to Talk with Your Kids About Death and Loss (Alyson Punzi)
Alyson Punzi discusses how she has clung to the Lord through immense grief and suffering, describing how to lead a child through the pain of loss to the hope of the gospel.
