Understanding Children: Supporting Healthy Goodbyes

June 13, 2025 |
Children's Mental Health, Understanding Children

Welcome to the next instalment of our Understanding Children series. To help you as you support your children at the end of this school year, we offer the following general guidance about school goodbyes. The ways you can support a more meaningful goodbye will depend on your child’s age as well as the nature of the relationships they shared with their teacher(s) and peers.

Why is it Important to Help Children Work through Goodbyes?

Life – for all people – is full of moments in which we must let go and say goodbye. Some goodbyes are temporary (such as saying goodbye to a parent or caregiver before a school day) while others are permanent (such as the death of a family pet). School goodbyes come every year, giving parents repeated opportunities at different developmental levels to help their children acknowledge and express the losses and gains that come when ending one school year and preparing to begin another. Thinking together about goodbyes provides children with a safe, open space to reflect on the various aspects of the relationships and experiences they’ve shared. At the end of the school year, you and your child can reflect on what was learned, what will be missed, and what he or she will carry with them (internally) into the next year.

 

Saying Goodbye to a Preschool or Kindergarten Teacher

Preschool and kindergarten teachers share a particularly close relationship with the children in their care. They often step in as caregiver substitutes throughout the day, helping children with managing and mastering many of their basic needs. In many cases, preschool teachers support their students’ development in significant ways (such as helping them develop enough comfort to say goodbye to their parents for the school day). When a teacher has played such a personal and important role in a child’s life, the goodbye will naturally also be a personal and important one. You can help a child this age take a more active role in the goodbye by helping them think of the things they liked about their teacher(s) and what role the teacher played in helping them learn new things. Children of this age need a lot of help from their parents to put words to their feelings, so how much this type of conversation is out in the open will depend on how much you keep it going.

Leaving Elementary School

The end of elementary school marks a major shift in a child’s school life. While elementary school teachers do not play the same nurturing role as preschool-kindergarten teachers, they still share a relatively close relationship as a class’s primary teacher. Leaving elementary school means leaving this type of teacher-student relationship behind and moving forward into a world of less personal teacher-student relationships. Children leaving elementary school are well aware of this shift and it can be both exciting and scary at the same time. In addition, relationships with peers have become more important by this point in a child’s life and students often end up in different schools in this transition. Help your child think about the most important people – adults and children – from their elementary years and keep yourself available for reminiscing and talking about the excitement and the worries about moving on. The end of each school year is a unique experience for every child. You can support a meaningful goodbye for a child of any age by keeping conversations about their feelings – both positive and negative – open. In the coming weeks, provide multiple opportunities to share and reflect, and remember that this process of reflection and letting go can even extend into the anticipation and then the start of the next school year. We welcome you to look through pictures from the school year as a family – this can often be a springboard for deeper conversations about experiences, growth, and the missing feelings that are a natural part of life and transitions.