HEALING HEARTBREAK | PARENTING

A Broken Heart Hurts at Any Age. Tips to Help Your Child Heal After a Breakup

My son is going through heartbreak. How can I best help his healing?

“Hannah (not her real name) and I broke up last night,” my son announced Monday morning.

They’re both twenty and this was the longest romantic relationship of their adult lives. As a veteran of a few failed relationships of my own, I could say I saw it coming. I could say their values were ultimately too different for the long haul. But I won’t.

I feel empathy for them both. Breakups suck, regardless of whether they come over text, ghosting, a conversation, or as in Jack and Hanna’s case, a mutual, in-person decision to end it.

Seeing him in emotional pain is hard for me and at the same time, I know that no amount of talking, discussing, psychologizing, or sharing my breakup stories with him will relieve the intense grief he is feeling right now.

With 31 years of parenting experience under my belt, I’ve had several opportunities to nurse my two daughters’ broken hearts. Seeing your kids in pain, no matter their age does not get easier with practice.

What has gotten better is knowing what works and what doesn’t in ushering them through the grieving process.

Stay in your own lane

What children need most is our support. This has happened to them, not you. Don’t try to fix their boo-boo. A broken heart is not a skinned knee. They want to be heard, not talked at. Give them space. When they are ready to process their feelings, sit with them with a blanket on the sofa and cry together.

Let them have their feelings

Don’t try to rush them along through the hard feelings no matter how uncomfortable you may be feeling. They don’t need a lot of words and may even regress to acting much younger to seek comfort from you. It’s normal.

Validate their emotions. Say something like, I see you are really sad right now. I know. I get it. It sucks. It’s really hard losing someone you loved. When you hear your child say, I feel like…, know an emotion is coming up to be healed. Help them make sense of it.

It’s our job as parents to help our children identify their feelings. This may be their first break up. They could be flooded with all kinds of emotions, be it anger, doubt, fear, or sadness.

The grief they are feeling is real and intense. As much as we’d like to see them arrive at acceptance and return to their old selves, they have to go through all the five stages like anyone else.

Be there for them

When a loved one is hurting, sometimes words don’t help. The same goes for our kids. Break your plans. Watch a funny movie. Order a pizza. Don’t force the conversation, it will hopefully unfold naturally and when it does, you’ll be there with a shoulder to cry on and extra-soft tissue at the ready.

Trust your child to work it through

Don’t suffocate them with your worry and endless questions. Instead, let yourself be available when they need to talk. They are humans in training. Be a good example.

They don’t need your emotional enabling. That’s you trying to make yourself feel better. Put your feelings aside, and show them that finding courage to feel even the scariest emotion will get them closer to healing.

Do not say this!

It was puppy love. You’ll get over it. Think back to how you felt when you fell in love for the first time. Did you feel surreal? Did you lose your appetite? Had trouble sleeping? Were you obsessively thinking about your beloved? Did you think you may not survive your first breakup?

Your child is no different. Do him or her a favor and sit in the discomfort of grief with them. They don’t need platitudes. They need your empathy.

There are plenty more fish in the sea! That may be true, but right now, it’s not what your heartbroken child needs to hear. Acknowledge their hurt. There’ll be loads of time to discuss future dating opportunities when their heart isn’t black and blue.

Do not, under any circumstances, bash the ex-boyfriend or girlfriend As tempting as this may be, all it will do is create more negative feelings. We’ve only been privy to our child’s side of the story. There’s no need to bad-talk the person your child once loved. It may backfire and result in them shutting down. If you simply must vent, do it with your partner or trusted friend, not your child.

Do not give sage advice like, Time Heals All Wounds Instead of hurrying your child toward accepting the breakup, be there with them as long as they need for every stage of grief, be it denial, bargaining, sadness, or anger. They will reach acceptance in their own, sweet time.

In conclusion

Get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. Manage your own anxiety. Watching your child in pain is hard because as parents, all we want for our kids is to be happy.

But the truth of the matter is that relationships, more often than not, end in breakups. Helping our children move through healing a broken heart will show them their own resilience. They will learn to identify their emotions. With our help, they will experience being with anger, sadness, and fear and know that the emotion is just that, a feeling in motion that comes and goes.

Healing heartbreak is a process whether you are 16 or 56. It’s a privilege to support our children and watch them mature into emotionally intelligent adults.

Great writers and their stories:

I’ve only recently discovered Marilyn Flower. She inspired me with her gifts, lessons, and magical moments she experienced in 2022.

And if you haven’t yet come across Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, where have you been? You’ll feel a little lighter, a little happier, and a little more hopeful about humanity after reading this story.

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Thank you for reading 💗

Love, Judy