Why Processing Your Own Pain Is the Most Important Thing You Can Do for Theirs
There’s a quiet trap that many solo parents fall into, especially in the first year or two of navigating major loss or transition. Life keeps moving. The kids need dinner, homework help, and rides to practice. You need to show up for your job. The house needs keeping. And so you function. You keep functioning. You get quite good at it, actually. You can go days, even weeks, operating on pure executive capacity, hitting every mark that’s visible from the outside. And underneath all of it, untouched and waiting, is a grief that hasn’t been processed yet.
The problem isn’t that you’re functioning. Functioning is survival, and survival is appropriate. The problem is when functioning becomes the permanent replacement for feeling. When staying in motion becomes a strategy for not having to go to the places that hurt. Grief doesn’t disappear when you ignore it. It relocates. It shows up in how you react when things go sideways. You feel it in the tightness that lives in your chest on ordinary Tuesday evenings and in the way you sometimes feel like you’re moving through your own life – but you’re not really in it. And in ways you may not fully see, it shapes how present you’re able to be for your kids.
The Parent Who Keeps Moving
Jonathan Pitts, a pastor and author who has spoken candidly about his years as a solo parent, lost his wife Wynter suddenly in 2018 and became a solo parent to four daughters overnight. By his own account, he did not initially handle his grief by processing it. He handled his grief by staying in motion. He moved to a new city, started a new pastoral role, took care of his girls, and kept going. He was functioning. He was showing up (in the physical sense). But unaddressed grief compresses and waits. It doesn’t disappear.
Eventually, through a relationship that went sideways, the isolation of feeling like he couldn’t be enough for his daughters, and the complexity of meeting someone new, the grief he had compartmentalized finally demanded his attention. The feelings had not gone anywhere. They had simply been waiting for a moment when he couldn’t outrun them.
This is not a failure of character. It is an almost-universal human response to catastrophic loss. We try to protect ourselves and the people around us by staying functional. We tell ourselves we’ll deal with it later, and we mean it. But later rarely arrives on its own. It has to be reckoned with intentionally.
What Happens When Parents Don’t Go There
Unprocessed parental grief doesn’t stay contained. It leaks into the space you share with your children. It shows up as a shorter fuse than you’d like. It shows up as an inability to tolerate your child’s emotions because they’re pressing against your own. It shows up as a kind of emotional flatness, a going-through-the-motions quality that your kids can feel even when they don’t have the words for it. Children are extraordinarily attuned to the emotional climate of their home. They don’t need you to tell them something is unresolved because they already sense it.
Jonathan’s oldest daughter, Alena Pitts Franklin, is now an author and speaker in her own right, and the two have reflected publicly on what those years looked like from opposite sides of the same experience. What their story reveals about the relationship between parental avoidance and a child’s permission to grieve is worth sitting with. Jonathan, by his own description, was not comfortable with anger, particularly his own. He was wired toward performance and productivity; he was focused on moving forward. So when Alena’s grief came out sideways – as anger, as withdrawal, as what looked like resistance – he didn’t know what to do with it.
One of the most freeing things Jonathan eventually gave Alena was the experience of watching him feel something in front of her. Not managing his emotions. Not redirecting hers. Just being in the pain. “I felt permission to be human,” she says, “because my parent had permission to be human.” That moment of mutual vulnerability, a father not holding it together, turned out to be incredibly healing. Not the solutions. Not the scripture. Simply the willingness to be undone, just a little, in his daughter’s presence.
This is the counterintuitive truth about parental grief processing: doing your own work isn’t just good for you. It’s one of the most direct investments you can make in your child’s emotional health. When a parent is visibly working to stay above the waterline, children often do the same, even at tremendous cost to themselves. But, when a parent is willing to go into their own grief fully, they create the conditions for their children to do the same.
Finding the Courage to Actually Go There
The invitation here isn’t to fall apart in front of your kids or to stop functioning. It’s to find the places, the relationships, and the spaces, where you can actually process what you’re carrying rather than just carrying it more efficiently.
For some people, that looks like counseling. For others, it’s a trusted community. For Jonathan, it came partly through rituals, what he calls marking moments: small, intentional practices that forced him to actually sit with grief rather than moving past it. Lighting a candle. Reciting a prayer. Letting someone’s name be spoken at the dinner table rather than buried in the silence of everyone pretending to be okay.
Grief researcher and author David Kessler writes, “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered.” That rebuilding requires actually touching the loss, not avoiding it. And it requires a community around you while you do it. The solo parenting road is already heavy enough without carrying the additional weight of suppressed emotion. Your kids don’t need you to have it all together. They simply need you to be on the journey of getting there—of showing them you’re willing to go to the hard places too.
Key Takeaways:
1. Unprocessed grief doesn’t disappear; it relocates, and its effects show up in the emotional climate of your home and in how present you’re able to be for your kids.
2. When parents do their own grief work, they give their children implicit permission to do theirs, and that permission is often more powerful than anything a parent can say directly.
You don’t have to navigate any of this alone. Every week on the Solo Parent Podcast, we sit down and talk through the challenges single parents like you are actually dealing with. Search Solo Parent on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. New episodes weekly!
