I may sound like a broken record when I keep bringing everything back to education, but it is hard not to, because it quietly influences how we experience almost everything else in life. Today, the trigger was a short write-up by a friend who started with a simple question: Why does “we need to talk” feel like a threat to our entire existence? Because, in some ways, it is.
We are never truly taught that there is a “need to talk”—not just with others, but, more crucially, with ourselves. We are not guided on how to sit with our feelings, how to name them, or how to make sense of them. So, when we hear the words “we need to talk,” it signifies something entirely different. It feels like escalation. Like a situation that demands “all arms.” Like something is about to break, and we are already unprepared. Not because the conversation is hard, but because we have never learned how to have it.
And perhaps that is the deeper loss we bear—the loss of the ability to converse with ourselves. The inability to pause, to grant ourselves space, to understand what is happening within us before we are asked to respond to the world outside. When that inner dialogue is absent, every external conversation begins to feel like a confrontation. And perhaps that is one of our earliest and most invisible experiences of grief—not something we recognise, but something we live with.
I am reminded of my niece at ten, who asked for two goldfish—Anna and Bella. She fed them every day, made sure the bowl was clean, and watched them with a kind of care that only children seem to possess. One morning, we woke up to find both fish dead. She was still asleep, and the adults in the house were left with a question we were not quite prepared for—how do we tell her? It did not go down well. There was shock, then silence, and then inconsolable crying. And then, something else. She insisted we bury them in a pot in the garden. Looking back, that may have been her first real encounter with grief, and instinctively, she knew what to do—she gave it a ritual, a space, a meaning.
Because grief is not just sadness. It is the moment reality refuses to match what we expected. It is the collapse of something that felt certain—a presence, a pattern, a possibility. It is not only about losing someone; it is about losing what that someone meant, what they held together, what they quietly made possible. Grief feels like powerlessness. It asks us to sit with something we cannot fix, reverse, or control. And that is precisely why we either rush to escape it—or stay trapped in it, long after the moment has passed.
Her next encounter occurred later, when her mother was admitted to hospital for surgery. She was usually fine when her mother travelled, but this time was different. Travel was temporary and predictable, but a hospital brought uncertainty. That was more difficult to accept. It makes one wonder what we truly believe grief to be. Is it solely about death, or is it also about the disruption of what feels stable and anticipated?
For much of her early years, she was in a Montessori environment where learning was conceptual, exploratory, and self-paced. She was not constantly compared to others, nor pushed into structured competition. It makes me wonder whether the question is not whether children experience pressure or failure, but whether they are helped to understand and process what those experiences mean.
We spend a lot of time debating educational systems—traditional, Montessori, Waldorf—each with its own philosophy of learning. But there is a quieter question we rarely ask: what is the child’s relationship with learning?
That relationship is where some of the earliest, most unseen forms of grief start. When a child feels they are not good at something, that it is not for them, or that they are not noticed, something shifts. Not dramatically or visibly, but something disconnects. If that moment is not recognised or named, it does not go away. It quietly settles and begins to influence how the child appears later—through disinterest, avoidance, withdrawal, or sometimes overwhelming emotional reactions.
Grief is not just about loss; it also involves the difficulty of making sense of change, accepting success without fear, and enduring failure without falling apart. Yet, we do not teach this. We instruct children on how to perform, but rarely on how to connect—their experiences, their feelings, and what it all means for them.
That, perhaps, is the missing conversation.
Because when a child can say that something is hard, that something matters, or that something does not feel like them, they are not just becoming better learners. They are learning how to stay connected to themselves.
I find myself thinking about what I want for my girls. Not a life without difficult conversations, but the ability to approach them differently. To move from hearing “we need to talk” with anxiety, to saying “let’s talk” with calm and confidence. To be part of an environment that allows them to sit with ambiguity, to work through what they feel, and to trust the voices within them—without fear of being dismissed, silenced, or burned for it, like Joan of Arc.
Because perhaps the true purpose of education is not merely to prepare children for the world, but to ensure they do not lose themselves in the process.
