Healthy Goodbyes
Endings matter for children. The conclusion of a supportive program can be just as meaningful as the beginning. In Primary Project, where a consistent relationship, emotional safety, and trust are built over time, how we say goodbye can play an important role in a child's emotional development.
Children can experience mixed emotions when Primary Project sessions come to an end - perhaps pride, sadness, excitement, uncertainty, and sometimes anxiety. Without intentional closure, these feelings might be confusing or internalized as a loss or abandonment.
Healthy goodbyes should be a structured, intentional, and supportive ending to a child's time in the playroom. Healthy goodbyes should begin long before the final session. Being new to Primary Project at Pine Brook Elementary School in the Greece Central School District, I reflected on how to incorporate this into the conclusion of my first cycle with the program and wanted to share this with you.
About a month prior to the cycle conclusion, I decided to have each child make a construction paper chain with four links to represent their remaining sessions in the playroom. Each week when the child arrived at the playroom, they would remove a link from their chain. They could visually see how many sessions remained. I believe the chain helped make the abstract concept of time more tangible and provided predictability and emotional preparation. I felt it created a space for ongoing conversations between the child and myself about feelings related to its ending. It provided a time to reflect on past meaningful moments with both pride and some sadness, as can be a normal response to transition.
I found the chain link activity paired visual structure with emotional support. The activity honored the child's Primary Project experience, strengthened coping skills to continue to build resilience, and modeled a respectful way to say goodbye. I believe the unfolding and removal of the paper chain links helped reinforce a core message of a healthy goodbye: relationships do not disappear when Primary Project ends - they merely change.
“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
-A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
Guest Column written by Martha Reale, Child Associate at Pine Brook Elementary School in Greece, New York. Children's Institute is a proud partner of the Greece Central School District, which currently implements Primary Project in 6 elementary schools.
