Anne Berenberg

Anne Hatcher Berenberg, Ph.D. was widowed when her children were young. She is a clinical psychologist in Northfield, Illinois, specializing in work with children and adolescents and their parents. She has a B.A. in Social Relations from Harvard University, an M.A. in Psychology from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the City University of New York. With her new husband, Jack Cain, she is the co-author of Now: Overcoming Crushing Grief by Living in the Present. Her new book, 10 Steps for Parenting Your Grieving Children, written along with Vicki Scalzitti and Jack Cain, is available on Amazon.

Articles:

First Thanksgiving After a Death is Challenging

One night in the April that they were 4 and 9, my two sons were tucked into their beds by their loving young father, Richard.  That was to be the last time they saw him.  The next morning, they woke up to learn that he was dead from a heart attack. Our world had shattered overnight.  The boys cried in pain and bewilderment—and so did I. Over the next months, I struggled to find what pieces of our lives could stay the same, what could be there in altered form, what could now only be held in memory, and what […]

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‘Daddy Died, Mommy. Are You Going to Die, too?’

When children lose one of their parents to death, they may worry that their other parent will die as well. This worry can also come if another person who has been very important to them (such as a grandparent) dies. What can we do to keep those worries to a minimum? We lay the first piece of groundwork for keeping anxiety from growing too large by helping bereaved children have a clear, understandable story about their loved one’s death that makes it specific to that person. What does that mean? It means using words the child can understand to tell […]

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