Pet insurer MORE THAN has teamed up with children’s author and illustrator John Kelly to launch ‘We Won’t Forget our Furry Friend’, a new free-to-download storybook to help children deal with the loss of a family pet. According to new research conducted by MORE THAN, three in ten parents rank talking about the loss of a family pet as one of the top three hardest conversations to have with a child.
Professor Sam Wass, child psychologist and lecturer at the University of East London, said: “For many children, the death of a pet will be the first time they experience loss and grief. How you share these experiences as a family can have a huge impact on how your child will process these emotions. It’s really important that parents have the tools and resources to manage these conversations, to encourage children to express their emotions, and to demonstrate how normal it is to have these feelings. The best way to help a child to come to terms with the loss of a pet is to view it as part of a natural life cycle.”
Navigating grief and loss at any age can be difficult, with a vast majority (86%) of parents seeing the loss of a pet as something to work through together as a family. Many of us find it helpful to remember the life of their pet through rituals including framing a photo (60%), keeping an item which belonged to their departed pet (55%) and planting a tree (47%) in memory.
With seven in ten (70%) pet-owning parents worried about their child getting upset or overwhelmed about the loss of their dog or cat, MORE THAN has partnered with author and illustrator John Kelly and child psychologist Professor Sam Wass to publish ‘We Won’t Forget our Furry Friend’, a children’s storybook to help parents work through the topic of pet loss with their kids.
Luke Mangion, veterinary surgeon at MORE THAN said: “Pets spend every day of their lives bringing joy, love and companionship to us, and spending quality time with them is a formative part of childhood for many. We want pets to live forever, but the heartbreak and emotions that come when our four-legged friends eventually pass away can be devastating and hard to process. To help families through this tough and emotional time, we’ve created the storybook ‘We Won’t Forget our Furry Friend’, which families can read together to help process the loss.
“Whilst some parents turn to euphemisms including ‘our pet is not suffering anymore’ (43%) and ‘our pet has gone to a better place’ (31%), ‘We Won’t Forget our Furry Friend’ draws on Professor Sam Wass’ advice to be literal, open, and direct when discussing pet loss. This will help all family members process the loss with more understanding and acceptance.”
Professor Sam has shared his top tips for parents looking to have a conversation about pet loss with their children:
Let the emotions happen
Often, when we see our child sad, we can’t resist the urge to try to ‘snap them out of it’. But there’s a lot of evidence now that trying to suppress and distract negative emotions is not the best way to manage them. Instead, it’s better to just to accept that your child is feeling sad - emphasising that these emotions are entirely natural, and that they might feel sad for a while.
Label emotions
The death of a pet can bring up complex, difficult emotions - emotions that a child might be experiencing for the first time. One thing that can help your child to understand what they’re feeling is if you try, sensitively, to use words to describe back to your child how you think that they’re feeling. Putting verbal labels onto emotions can help a child to understand what these new emotions are that they’re experiencing. And, over time, this also helps children to communicate how they’re feeling to someone else - which is also a big part of learning to cope.
It’s OK for you to be sad, too
Children are sensitive to how you're feeling - so it’s important to get your mood right before you talk to them about what has happened. But this doesn’t mean that you need to be cheerful. It can actually help a child to understand how they are feeling if they can see that you are feeling the same way, too. Then, when they see you starting to recover from your grief, it might help them to start the steps of them recovering from their grief, too.
Talk about the good times and the bad
One of the things that’s important for your child is that they don’t feel that they are the only ones in the family who are mourning. If they feel that everyone in the family is grieving together, this can really help them to normalise how they’re feeling and give them strength to recover. So, it’s helpful to talk together as a family about your pet - talking about the happy times that you've shared together, as well as your shared feelings of grief at their loss.
Children are very literal
It’s important that you set a positive example for your child, by talking openly, directly and honestly about what has happened. It might be tempting to try to soften the blow by using ‘child-friendly’ phrases - such as by saying that your pet has just ‘gone to sleep’ - but this might cause confusion, which doesn’t help in the long run.
Some kind of a family ritual can help
One thing that often helps families coping with grief is to perform some kind of ritual to ‘say goodbye’ to your pet - such as by burying them somewhere or making something to remember them by. Giving your child some choice over how this happens is a good idea, too. One of the things that’s tricky about losing a pet is the loss of control - your child didn’t want this to happen! So the more that they can feel in control of the mourning process, the better.
When talking about death, emphasise natural cycles
It’s not uncommon around death for people to say that they feel responsible for what happened - that it’s their fault that their pet has died. One thing that can help with this is to emphasise that death is part of nature. So, try to remind your child that leaves fall off the trees in autumn and then regrow in the spring, that some animals are being born just as others are dying, and so on. This might help your child to recognise that death is a natural process and is nobody’s fault.
Remind yourself that other people have been through this, too
It can also be helpful for a child to read about other families who have experienced the same loss of a pet that your family has. Reading how other people felt in the same situation can be a big part of learning to understand, and to process, our own feelings of grief and loss at the loss of a much-loved pet.
MORE THAN is inviting families to visit its website to read ‘We Won’t Forget our Furry Friend’ and prompt open conversations between parents and children around the difficult topic of pet loss, when the time comes.
The storybook will be available for download on MORE THAN’s website for free.
