Hi Mark,
I'm in the same boat with you. DD is 5, we lost DH 3 months ago, sudden, unexpected death.
My daughter also reaches up in the air to grab for Daddy, but she really only does it when she is in the throes of a good, grieving, sobbing fit. She's only had 3 or 4 of these in 13 weeks, so I tend to think they really are valid and not just manipulation. However, I treat these fits the same way others have mentioned; I miss Daddy too, it's okay to cry but also okay to be happy, enjoy life, etc; bedtime is never delayed more than 5 minutes somehow, so if she is manipulating me she's not getting very far.
I agree though. I'm having a hard time differentiating between grief and typical acting out and boundary testing. Some things were easy to define (she had an "accident" at school a few weeks out from the death and she's been successfully trained for 3 years), but others not so much (I got a note this morning that Friday she punched another student in the arm when she got angry).
My community has a fantastic program called Children's Bereavement Art Group; it is offered at no cost. I have DD on the waiting list and she is supposed to start the program in about a month. The group meets every other week for 10 sessions, each session is 1.5 hours. I'm hoping this gives her an appropriate outlet so she doesn't act out in anger, in case that event was a grief/stress event.
Off-Topic - I switched my forum view from that Chalkboard, and now I'm not seeing I can "Like" posts. Is anyone else seeing the same thing?
Jessica
