About Linda Goldman

Linda Goldman has worked as a kindergarten, first- and second-grade teacher, and as a  guidance counselor in the Baltimore County  public school system for 18 years.  She recieved her M.S. degree at Loyola College in Maryland in 1977. Mrs. Goldman is certified by the Association for Death Education and Counseling as a grief therapist and educator. She now maintains a private grief therapy practice, working with children, adolescents, women with prenatal loss, and grieving adults

Linda's experience and training in the field of education, coupled with her life experiences and knowledge as a therapist have resulted in a deeply felt desire to help children work with issues of loss and grief.The success of her grief work has led her to educate other caring adults through trainings in school systems and universities including Johns Hopkins Graduate School and U. of Md. School of Social Work/ Advanced Certification Program for Children and Adolecsents, sharing diverse ways of working with children and grief. Linda participated as a consultant for the National Head Start Program and as a panalist in the National Teleconference: When A Parent Dies: How to Help The Child. She was named bythe Washingtonian Magazine as one of the top therapists in the MD, VA. DC area. Presently she is serving on the board of The Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) and the advisory board for Hospice Caring.

Linda Goldman is the author of Life and Loss: A Guide To Help Grieving Children (1994, 2000 2nd ed.), Taylor and Francis Publishers, Breaking The Silence: A Guide To Help Children With Complicated Grief (1996),Taylor and Francis Publishers Bart Speaks Out: An Interactive Storybook for Young Children On Suicide (1998) WPS Publishers, and Helping The Grieving Child in the School (2000) a fastback published by Phi Delta Kappan. She has written numerous articles found in the ADEC Forum, The Head Start Journal, The Young Child, and Educational Leadership. Linda has also created a CD-ROM and 3 part video training, Kids Grieve Too on The Grieving Child, Helping the Grieving Child In The Schools, and Children and Complicated Grief (2000), produced by KidsPeace.

Linda has had personal issues of loss and grief -- divorce, miscarriage, and a stillborn daughter, Jennifer. These issues helped her understand how the underlying stress, loss, grief, anger, and pain are universal and timeless. Linda lives with her husband and son near Washington, DC.

Contact Linda by email:

Please Note these changes !!!
NEW e-mail address:   lgold@erols.com This address is being phased out,
please update your records and begin to use only my new address:
linda.goldman@verizon.net

NEW website: www.erols.com/lgold This older website is being phased out
and should be replaced in your addresses and links by
www.childrensgrief.net

 

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Children entering this new millennium are faced with life issues that were unspeakable to us growing up as children. Death related tragedies such as suicide, homicide, and AIDS, and non-death related traumas such as divorce and separation, foster care and abandonment, bullying and terrorism, and abuse and violence have left our children sitting alone in their homes, unfocused and unmotivated in their classrooms, and terrorized in their
communities. They are overwhelmed with their feelings and distracted by their thoughts.

Survivorship of these traumas creates for any child a loss of their assumptive world of safety, protection, and predictability. The role of the media as a surrogate communal parent and extended family further creates
this same traumatic loss of this assumptive world for many if not most of our children.

Children naturally assume their world will be filled with safety, kindness, and meaning as they attempt to answer the universal questions of who am I and why am I here. All too often these qualities seem to disappears into a nightmarish universe of randomness, isolation, and unpredictability. This leaves many of todayıs young people immersed in a new assumption: There is no future. There is no safety. There is no connectedness or meaning to my life. By joining together as a global grief team, caring adults can co-create an assumptive world that again provides a childıs birthright to presume love, generosity, and value will be integral parts of their lives.

We are raising a segment of our youth that are numbed, disconnected from their hearts, their minds, and their consciousnesses, and choosing all to easily, other alternatives such as drugs and alcohol, crime and violence as ways of coping with the loss of their assumptive world. In yesterdayıs world we may have protected ourselves from trauma by having fire drills in our schools. In todayıs world our kids protect themselves from danger in the schools by having gun-fire drills. Too many of todayıs school children are grieving children. So many of our boys and girls are born into a world of grief and loss issues that live inside their homes and lay waiting for them outside their doorsteps, on their streets, schoolyards, and classrooms. Increasingly, children are traumatized by prevailing social and societal loss issues in their families, their schools, their nation, and their world.

Text adapted with permission from Life and Loss: A Guide to Help Grievng Children, Breaking the Silence: A Guide To Help Children With Complicated Grief: Suicide, Homicide, AIDS, Violence, and Abuse and Helping The Grieving Child in the School Healing Magazine (Kidspeace)and Growing Up Fast (NES).
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