Letting Children Share in Grief A FEW decades ago, children often didn't attend funerals. The thinking was that they should be sheltered from the pain of losing a loved one. And as Americans started living longer, the need to even broach the subject of death was delayed because many grandparents survived deep into their golden years. But recently, the opposite view - that children should be as involved in the grieving process as adults are - has been taking hold, reflecting an increasingly common belief that children are better off when their grief is acknowledged and they are allowed to mourn in the company of relatives and peers. Grief centers for children are one example: there are now more than 300 of these nonprofit counseling centers, up from 204 in 2002. And Donna Schuurman, the executive director of the Dougy Center for Grieving Children and Families in Portland, Ore., which helped establish these centers, estimated that there are at least 150 more peer-to-peer programs nationwide that serve a similar function. The rise of hospice care, which provides bereavement services for relatives, including children, has also played a role, as have grief camps for children. "Twenty-five years ago, children were "invisible grievers," " said Vicky Ott, executive director of Fernside, a nonprofit center in Cincinnati that served 1,300 children and adults last year. There was an attitude, she said, that they "are resilient, they will bounce back, we don't need to talk to them about death. I think that's changed a lot. David Horst's experience bears that out. When his wife, Jennifer, was dying of leukemia in 2010, hospice workers encouraged him to prepare his children for her death. Two months before she died, Mr. Horst, an antiques dealer in Lebanon, Pa., who is now 40, began reading his 5- and 6-year-old books like "Lifetimes: The Beautiful Way to Explain Death to Children." He didn't hesitate to cry in front of them - in fact, he did it "all the time," he said. And he took them to a support group at Hospice and Community Care in Lancaster, Pa. Without the encouragement of the hospice workers, he would never have prepared his children that way, Mr. Horst said. But he came to believe that avoiding the subject would have been a mistake. "In the long run, it will be detrimental to the kids," said Mr. Horst, who recently created a foundation in his wife's honor. You have to face it head-on. On the day of the burial, while he was sitting at his wife's grave with his son on his lap, his son said: "You know, Dad, Mom will never suffer anymore, right? The cancer is gone. That's when Mr. Horst said he understood that his son had absorbed what he had been trying to communicate to him. "I lost it," he said. They got all the suffering she was going through, or at least he did, and that now it's over. That's amazing. TRYING to protect children from the pain of the death of a relative can actually make matters worse, some experts say. Children pick up "on the message the adults give verbally and nonverbally to "not go there," " said Patti Anewalt, a grief counselor at Hospice and Community Care. As a result, kids are extremely anxious. In contrast, a century or more ago, when illness, death and grief all took place at home, children learned to regard them as a natural part of life, said Alan Wolfelt, a psychologist who runs the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Fort Collins, Colo., which has trained a generation of grief counselors. "We included children in the experience because someone was dying in your home, next door or across the street," he said. But America has since become a "mourning avoidant" culture, he added, in part because many 40- and 50-year-olds still have living parents. And that longevity, he wrote in an e-mail, has "resulted in a tendency to overprotect children from the realities of grief and loss." Indeed, death is such a foreign concept to some families, he said, that he has been told, "We just don't do death." Grief camps like Camp Erin or Comfort Zone Camp, however, offer children a place where they can talk about a dead relative without feeling self-conscious or worrying about making schoolmates squeamish. And free support groups offered by nonprofit organizations like the Dougy Center and Fernside have helped to make grief more acceptable. As J. William Worden, a psychologist and one of the key investigators on the 1986 Harvard Child Bereavement Study, said, "The value of bereavement programs for kids is it helps them feel less "odd person out." " FOR the last four years, Jerry Goldsmith, a volunteer at New Hope for Kids, a grief center in Maitland, Fla., has listened to children ages 7 to 12 talk about parents and siblings they have lost. He has watched them create memory boxes in their relatives" honor, or take out their frustration in the "hurricane room," which is equipped with a boxing bag. It has been a bittersweet experience for Mr. Goldsmith, a retired headhunter for financial services executives, because he lost his father to a heart attack in 1952, when he was 9. And for more than 20 years, he didn't cry, he said. Now Mr. Goldsmith can't help but wonder, he said, "How would my life have been different if I had some of today's resources?" Trying to avoid dealing with the loss of his father nearly kept him from becoming one, he added. "I was not going to get that close to anyone," he said. And while he eventually had three children, he said, "I would have loved the opportunity to have fully grieved and started the healing process at age 9 instead of 28," when he married.