Book: Parenting Through Crisis

Overview
Barbara Coloroso’s Parenting Through Crisis (2000) is a compassionate, practical guide to helping children navigate loss, grief, and disruptive change. Drawing on decades of work with families, she reframes crisis not as an event to be fixed quickly but as a human passage children can survive and grow through when the adults around them offer honest information, steady structure, and unwavering dignity. The book ranges across deaths, divorce, illness, moves, violence, and public tragedies, always centering a child’s developmental needs and a parent’s capacity to be both sturdy and kind.

Core framework
Coloroso applies her well-known family typology, brick-wall, jellyfish, and backbone, to crisis. Brick-wall families impose rigid control and suppress feelings; jellyfish homes dissolve into chaos or overindulgence; backbone families combine firmness and flexibility. In hard times, backbone parenting becomes the anchor: dependable routines, clear limits, and emotional presence without punitive harshness or permissive collapse. She links this stance to her “inner discipline” approach and the three Rs, restitution, resolution, and reconciliation, as humane ways to repair harm and restore connection when stress fuels misbehavior.

Understanding grief and change
Grief is presented as uneven, cyclical, and deeply personal. Children do not move through neat stages; they revisit losses at new developmental levels and on anniversaries, holidays, and milestones. Regressions, swings between play and sorrow, and bursts of anger or guilt are common. Coloroso emphasizes that crisis strips away a child’s sense of safety and control; the adult task is to rebuild both through predictability, truthful explanation, and meaningful choice.

Honest communication
The book urges clear, age-appropriate truth-telling. Euphemisms about death confuse and frighten; concrete language, “the body stopped working and cannot start again”, prevents misconceptions. With suicide, addiction, or violence, she advocates naming the reality without moralizing, separating the person from the act, and repeatedly assuring children they are not to blame. Questions deserve direct answers; it is acceptable to say “I don’t know” and return later.

Rituals, routines, and expression
Rituals give shape to sorrow and mark transitions. Coloroso encourages inviting, not forcing, children to attend funerals or memorials, with careful preparation and a safe adult to accompany them. Everyday routines, meals, bedtimes, school, offer ballast. She promotes play, art, storytelling, and movement as essential avenues for expressing feelings that may not surface in words. Memory books, letters, and actions of service can honor the person or place lost while restoring a child’s sense of agency.

Special situations
In divorce, children must not be messengers, spies, or confidants. Parents maintain consistent expectations across households and protect the child’s right to love both parents. Illness brings uncertainty; sharing truthful updates, naming feelings, and maintaining normalcy where possible reduce fear. After public tragedies or disasters, the order is safety, connection, and calm: limit graphic media, stick to routines, and offer simple ways to help others. Schools and community networks become crucial partners.

What to avoid and when to seek help
Coloroso cautions against false reassurance, “at least” statements, and attempts to hurry grief. Do not make children caretakers of adult emotions. Watch for sustained withdrawal, self-harm, persistent nightmares, drastic behavioral change, or prolonged inability to function; these signal the need for professional support. Most children, given time, truth, and tenderness, find a new equilibrium.

Enduring message
The book’s promise is steady and hopeful: crisis will change a child, but with backbone parenting, respect, structure, and opportunities to repair and reconnect, change need not diminish them. Dignity given in the worst moments becomes the foundation for resilience that endures.