When a beloved pet dies, adults often juggle calls to the vet, decisions about funeral planning, and practical questions like what to do with ashes. Children feel the same loss, but they rarely have words for it. What they do understand, very clearly, is that something warm and familiar is gone. Creating simple, hands-on rituals and pet memorial crafts for kids can give that big feeling a safe place to go.
More families are choosing cremation for both people and pets than ever before, which means more households are deciding how to remember a loved one at home. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the U.S. cremation rate is projected to reach about 63.4% in 2025, more than double the burial rate, and is expected to climb above 80% by 2045. As cremation becomes the norm, many families are keeping a pet’s ashes in pet urns for ashes, choosing small cremation urns or keepsake urns to share among siblings, or wearing a tiny portion of ashes in cremation jewelry. The question is no longer just “Are we cremating?” but “How do we help our children feel included and supported in the way we remember this pet?”
This article offers gentle, practical ideas for simple activities to remember a pet, with a focus on safety, emotional support, and the particular needs of children at different ages. It also shows how these projects can sit comfortably alongside choices about cremation urns for ashes, pet cremation urns, and other memorial options from Funeral.com.
Why Creative Memorials Help Children Grieve
Adults often process grief with words: telling stories, writing letters, reading articles about pet urns for ashes or keeping ashes at home. Children frequently express grief through play, movement, and images. Art-making gives them a way to show what their bodies feel before they can explain it.
The American Art Therapy Association describes art therapy as a mental health profession that uses the creative process of making art to support emotional well-being and expression. Research on bereavement and art therapy suggests that drawing, collage, and similar children’s grief art projects can help kids explore feelings, maintain a sense of connection with the person or pet who died, and reduce distress over time. A practice brief from the American Counseling Association specifically notes that simple creative activities—like decorating picture frames or memory boxes—can be powerful tools in supporting bereaved children.
For a child, a memory jar, a painted stone, or a decorated frame becomes more than a craft. It is proof that their relationship with their pet still matters. When you place that item beside a favorite photo or a soft-colored pet cremation urn, you’re telling them, “Your love has a place in this house.”
Choosing Where the Memorial Lives in Your Home
Before you gather supplies for pet memorial crafts for kids, it helps to think about where the finished pieces will live. This ties directly into your broader funeral planning and decisions about cremation urns or burial.
Many families now choose cremation for pets and then create a small home memorial instead of—or in addition to—a formal service. Funeral.com’s guide Understanding Pet Cremation: How It Works, What to Expect, and How to Decide walks through the practical steps from the vet to the crematory, as well as options for urns and keepsakes. When remains come home, families often wonder where to put them and how visible they should be, especially with children in the house.
Articles like How to Choose a Cremation Urn That Actually Fits Your Plans (Home, Burial, Scattering, Travel) and Keeping Ashes at Home: How to Do It Safely, Respectfully, and Legally help adults think through placement, long-term plans, and family dynamics. Once you’ve decided whether you are keeping ashes at home, choosing water burial, scattering, or planning for a future cemetery plot, you can design kid-friendly memorials that fit that plan instead of working against it.
If you’ll have a visible urn, you might choose something gentle and approachable, like a soft-toned piece from the Pet Cremation Urns for Ashes collection or a petite option from Small Pet Cremation Urns for Ashes. If you’d rather keep the ashes tucked away, you can still create a “public” memorial shelf using photos, crafts, and perhaps cremation jewelry from Funeral.com’s Cremation Jewelry and Cremation Necklaces collections. That way, children see something tangible and loving, without needing to confront an urn if that feels too intense.
Simple Pet Memorial Crafts Kids Can Help Create
Memory jars: holding tiny pieces of everyday love
A memory jar is one of the simplest simple activities to remember a pet, yet it can carry enormous meaning. For school-age children and teens, it lets words and images sit side by side. For younger kids, you can adapt it by using pictures or small objects instead of writing.
Invite your child to help decorate a clean jar with ribbons, stickers, or drawings of paw prints and favorite toys. Then, over days or weeks, you can add tiny slips of paper with memories or messages. To keep it manageable, you might suggest prompts such as “My favorite thing we did together was…,” “You always made me laugh when…,” or “If I could tell you one thing today, it would be….” These short prompts turn the jar into an ongoing children’s grief art project rather than a one-time assignment.
Some families place the jar next to a small urn from the Keepsake Cremation Urns for Ashes collection, so written memories and ashes feel like two parts of the same tribute.
Decorated picture frames and quiet corners
For many kids, seeing their pet’s face every day matters more than understanding what an urn is. Helping them create a decorated frame is a concrete way to honor that bond. They can glue on small bones or fish shapes cut from paper, draw hearts and paw prints, or write the pet’s name along the edge.
You might set this frame next to small cremation urns or pet urns for ashes that feel visually gentle—a figurine from the Pet Figurine Cremation Urns for Ashes collection, or a petite piece from Pet Keepsake Cremation Urns for Ashes. This turns the space into a tiny “altar” where kids can say goodnight, add drawings, or leave a favorite toy.
When you place your child’s craft beside an urn, you’re also modeling that cremation urns for ashes are not scary objects. They’re part of the story of how your family chose to care for a body after death and keep love close in daily life—something Funeral.com explores in depth in Cremation Urns, Pet Urns, and Cremation Jewelry: A Gentle Guide to Keeping Ashes Close.
Garden stones and outdoor memorial spots
If your family has a yard, balcony, or nearby garden, kid-friendly garden stones can offer a way to remember a pet in nature. For some children, this feels less intense than looking at ashes. You can buy plain stepping stones or use smooth river rocks large enough to decorate safely.
With younger children, focus on non-toxic paints or paint markers and supervise closely so stones don’t become projectiles. Older kids might enjoy pressing small glass beads or tiles into air-dry clay to create a mosaic of paw prints or initials. These projects become part of using crafts in family memorials—stones lining the spot where you scattered a portion of ashes, or circling a tree planted in your pet’s honor.
If your family is considering water burial or scattering near a favorite trail, reading Funeral.com’s Understanding What Happens During a Water Burial Ceremony can help you design rituals that are safe and legal, and then adapt child-friendly versions of those rituals with stones, flowers, or biodegradable offerings.
Crafts that connect to urns and cremation jewelry
Some families feel drawn to involve kids directly in items that hold ashes. For others, that feels too intimate. There is no single right answer. If your child is curious and you are comfortable, you can create gentle projects around cremation jewelry and cremation urns without placing responsibility on the child.
A teen might help choose a pendant from the cremation necklaces collection and design a small card that explains why they chose that symbol. A younger child might string beads in their pet’s colors on a bracelet they wear only to special remembrance moments, while you quietly wear a locket or charm from Funeral.com’s cremation jewelry range. Guides like Cremation Jewelry 101: What It Is, How It’s Made, and Who It’s Right For can help you decide which pieces feel appropriate for which ages.
In these moments, the goal is not to make a child responsible for ashes, but to show them that jewelry, urns, photos, and handmade items can all work together as one love story.
Adapting Crafts and Materials to Different Ages
“Age-appropriate materials for crafts” is about more than choking hazards and washable paint—though those matter. It’s also about matching the emotional demands of a project to what a child can handle right now.
Toddlers and preschoolers often do best with very short, sensory-focused tasks: pressing a handprint next to a paw print you saved earlier, or placing stickers on a frame while you quietly say, “This is for [pet’s name]. We loved how they wagged their tail.” Their attention span is short; the goal is simply to pair warm adult presence with gentle remembrance.
School-age children can usually handle slightly more structured children’s grief art projects: drawing a favorite memory, writing a simple note, or choosing items for a memory jar. They may ask direct questions about whether the pet hurts, where the body is, or what will happen at a scattering or water burial. You can answer honestly in simple language and, if ashes are involved, explain how cremation urns and pet urns for ashes work in your own family’s plan.
Teens may want control and privacy. They might design their own digital collage, create a playlist, or choose whether to help pick pet cremation urns or a pendant from the cremation jewelry collection. They can also read Journal articles such as Pet Urns for Ashes: A Complete Guide for Dog and Cat Owners or Cremation Urns, Pet Urns, and Cremation Jewelry: A Gentle Guide to Keeping Ashes Close alongside you, turning questions about pet urns, keepsake urns, and how much does cremation cost into shared learning instead of whispered worry.
Using Crafts to Guide Conversation, Not Replace It
It can be tempting to see projects as a fix: “If we make enough things, they’ll feel better.” In reality, pet memorial crafts for kids work best as a backdrop for honest, unhurried talk.
As you decorate a frame or write slips for a memory jar, you can gently practice guiding conversations during activities. You might ask, “What do you miss most about them today?” or wonder aloud, “If they could come back for one day, what would you want to do together?” You might also check in with questions like, “Do you ever worry that you’ll forget them?”
Children often share deeper feelings when their hands are busy and their eyes are on the paper, not on you. This mirrors what grief counselors call “continuing bonds”—finding ways to stay connected to the person or pet who died in everyday life, which can ease grief rather than prolong it.
If a child doesn’t want to talk, that’s okay too. The craft itself is still a message: “Your relationship with this pet matters enough for us to spend time on it.”
Including Siblings and the Whole Family
When there are multiple children in the home, including siblings in projects can prevent jealousy and give everyone a role. One child might choose the photo; another might help pick a small cremation urn; a third might lead the way on decorating garden stones.
Sometimes, sharing a single object leads to conflict. That is where keepsake urns and smaller memorials can help. Funeral.com’s A Piece of Them, Always With You: Why Families Choose Keepsake Urns explains how petite urns and pet keepsake urns allow several family members to hold a symbolic portion of ashes. Children might each have a tiny keepsake on their own shelf, while a larger urn or figurine stays in a shared family space.
You can also use crafts to bridge between pet memorials and memorials for people. Articles like From Collars to Paw Prints: Meaningful Memorial Ideas for a Pet Who Has Died show how paw prints, collars, photos, and urns can come together in one display. If your family has already created a memorial for a grandparent or other relative, inviting kids to notice similarities (“We put flowers and photos by Grandpa’s urn, and now we’re doing something like that for [pet’s name]”) can normalize grief rituals rather than making them feel strange.
When Crafts Aren’t Enough: Watching for Signs a Child Needs More Help
For many children, the benefits of creative expression for grieving kids include better emotional regulation, fewer nightmares, and a sense of being heard. Studies of art therapy with bereaved children show increases in positive affect and decreases in negative affect when kids are given space to make art about their loss.
Still, crafts are not a cure-all. If a child is withdrawing from friends, regressing sharply (bedwetting, clinginess), having persistent sleep problems, or expressing self-blame and hopelessness for weeks at a time, it may be time to involve additional support. Pediatricians, school counselors, faith leaders, and licensed therapists—especially those trained in play or art therapy—can help.
In those conversations, the projects you’ve made together become useful starting points: the memory jar they haven’t touched in a month, the garden stone they keep rearranging, the frame they talk to at night. A professional can build on those children’s grief art projects instead of starting from scratch.
Letting the Memorial Grow as Your Family Heals
The first days after a pet dies can feel chaotic. You may still be on the phone with the vet or crematory, sorting out details like how much does cremation cost, researching cremation urns for ashes, or reading about keeping ashes at home versus scattering. Over time, those urgent decisions settle, and what remains are small, daily gestures: saying goodnight to a picture, touching a figurine urn as you walk past, noticing how a garden stone glints in the morning sun.
For children, these simple activities to remember a pet—memory jars, decorated frames, painted stones, bead bracelets—are not just distractions. They are living parts of the story: “We loved them. We miss them. We are still allowed to laugh.”
If you’d like to keep exploring, Funeral.com’s Journal has many gentle guides that pair practical questions about cremation urns, pet urns, cremation jewelry, water burial, and what to do with ashes with emotional support, including Cremation Urns, Pet Urns, and Cremation Jewelry: A Gentle Guide to Keeping Ashes Close, Pet Urns for Ashes: A Complete Guide for Dog and Cat Owners, and How Much Does a Funeral Cost? Complete Funeral Price Breakdown and Ways to Save. These resources can help you match the right combination of cremation urns, small cremation urns, keepsake urns, pet urns for ashes, and cremation necklaces to your family’s values—and to the crafts and rituals your children find most comforting.
