One of the realities of living through the coronavirus period is that death is coming ever closer to our social circles. Research demonstrates that parents tend to avoid talking to their children about death until forced to by the death of a specific person in the child’s life. It makes sense that parents tend to do this – death is an uncomfortable topic.
I asked parents in my Targeted Parenting classes to explain their reluctance to discuss death with their children. Here are two typical responses:
It’s like death is a scary monster that was looming in the distance. There were so many more pressing things to talk to my kids about – stranger danger, bullying, good touch/bad touch – and I made sure to talk to them about those topics. Now, as that monster is stomping ever closer, I feel like I need to talk to my kids about it, but it makes me so anxious, I’m sure I’ll mess up. Like, I don’t know what they are capable of understanding, or how to say it properly, or if I’m giving the wrong information.
As the group mulled this over, one parent said:
I really need to tell my kids that a beloved teacher in their school died. Right now, I’m controlling what access to information they have, so I don’t have to say anything immediately, but I know it’s something I have to do. I think I’ve been postponing it because I’m scared of the inevitable question: Mommy, will you die one day? I don’t know how to respond to that.
These two parents are confabulating two aspects of talking to kids about death – the cognitive aspect, and the emotional impact. The cognitive aspect of death can be boiled down to these questions:
- What do children understand about death?
- When are they capable of understanding it?
- How does cognitive development intersect with children’s ability to understand death?
The emotional impact of talking about death boils down to these question:
- Does talking about death increase children’s death anxiety?
- Am I capable of handling my child’s emotional reaction?
Cognitive Development:
I get it. Death seems like a huge topic. It’s not like we adults fully understand it (or are fully comfortable thinking about it!) So it’s natural that we think small children aren’t capable of understanding it.
There are basically five aspects of death that children have to understand, and they tend to grasp those concepts in a predictable, stepwise fashion. They are irreversibility, applicability, inevitability, causation, and cessation. Research demonstrates that children are capable of understanding death in a fairly sophisticated fashion.
Children who are five years old can understand the concept of irreversibility – once someone is dead, they can’t be alive again.
After that, in this order, children acquire the concepts of applicability, inevitability, and cessation. By the time they are school-age, typically developing children are capable of understanding that all things must die, that they themselves will one day die, and that death means all biological functions stop. From a cognitive perspective, your children are more capable of understanding death than you probably think they are.
Emotional Impact:
The emotional impact of talking to kids about death is more about the parents than the child. A study conducted in Australia found that children with a more mature death concept, who had explored the topic and fully understood it, endorsed much less “death anxiety” than children who had some confusion about death. So it’s better to demystify the topic, address any concerns they might have, and allow them to process.
This research makes sense, right? In general, demystifying anything makes it less scary. The best thing to do about any worry is to talk about it!
If we’re thinking “I’m not going to talk to my child about death, I don’t want to make him anxious,” that’s a rationalization. We’re trying to avoid our own discomfort, rather than doing what’s best for the child.
Some principles to keep in mind:
1. Child mental health trumps adult discomfort: If we’re avoiding talking about death to our children because of our own discomfort with the topic, we need to address that first. We need to process that discomfort ourselves, or in our own therapy, so that we’re capable of talking to the child in a healthy fashion.
2. Use direct and concrete language. It’s OK to use spiritual explanations, as long as we’re clear. If we say “Grandma went to live in the sky, in Heaven,” that’s a bit confusing. Is she still alive, but on another planet? Can I visit her there? Being specific – Grandma died. Her body was buried, but her soul went to Heaven. We can’t see her or talk to her, but we can always keep her love in our hearts – is much better. There’s nothing wrong with a spiritual explanation, as long as the child is clear about what happened.
3. Don’t be accidentally harmful. Saying things like “Your aunt was such a kind person that G-d wanted her to be an angel” may sound comforting. But what happens the next time you praise the child for being kind? Saying “we put the dog to sleep….” Is more palatable for adults, but what happens when it’s bedtime? It’s so much better to use clear language, and then to use spiritual or metaphoric explanations. “The dog died. His body is buried, but I like to think of his soul up in Puppy Heaven, running around and having fun.”
4. Tell the truth. We never, ever lie to kids. If your child asks “will you die one day?” respond honestly. “Everyone dies. Most of the time, parents die when their kids are all grown up already.” Ask the child what he wants to know about your death. The most typical concern is “Who will take care of me?” Explore that with the child. Talk concretely about who would care for the child, if a parent dies.
What to Expect:
1) Undoing: A certain level of undoing is normal for children. During the conversation, the child might talk about the person being alive in Heaven, or about advances in science that might one day allow that person to return. Don’t get into a debate about specifics, just validate the emotional aspect. “It would be wonderful if scientists one day invented a machine like that, right?” This is not the time to debate the feasibility of your seven-year- old’s plan to build a rocket that will allow him to visit Heaven.
2) Egocentricity: Children are naturally egocentric, so they put themselves at the center of a narrative. It’s normal for a child who hears about the death of a friend’s parent to worry that their friend won’t like them anymore, or upon hearing of the death of a bus driver, worry about how they’ll get to school. Don’t worry that this means the child is inherently selfish or doesn’t care. It’s simply the way little kids process information.
3) Inconsistency: Children process big concepts the way they sound out a word – one syllable at a time. It’s normal for a child to talk about death for a bit, and then change the subject to something more pressing for them, like what’s for dinner. This doesn’t mean they didn’t understand or that they don’t care. It’s just too much information for their brains to digest at once.
Adult brains tend to be more linear. Once we begin an unpleasant task, we want to get it over with. This is especially true if this topic is triggering for us, or if we are worried about the discomfort the conversation will engender. Children lose focus rapidly. That doesn’t mean they’re being avoidant or resistant, and it’s not an indicator that the conversation didn’t go well. Expect the child to bring the topic up again at what feels like a random time. My own children seem to become very philosophical (and thirsty) at bedtime.
If your child doesn’t bring it up again, and you feel like the conversation wasn’t concluded in a satisfactory way, it’s OK to float the topic again a few days later. Follow your child’s lead.
Death is a part of life. We should be prepared to talk to our kids about anything having to do with their lives, even the uncomfortable topics. As JK Rowling puts it in Harry Potter – Fear of the name increases fear of the thing itself. Being afraid to talk about anything increases the fear of that subject. There’s nothing that’s so scary that talking about it won’t make it better. In the end, we want to fully integrate that truth, and model it for our children.
© Robyn Koslowitz, 2020
References
Slaughter, Virginia & Griffiths, Maya. (2007). Death Understanding and Fear of Death in Young Children. Clinical child psychology and psychiatry. 12. 525-35. 10.1177/1359104507080980.
Slaughter, V., & Lyons, M. (2002). Learning about life and death in early childhood. Cognitive Psychology, 46, 1–30.
Slaughter,V., Jaakkola, K., & Carey, S. (1999). Constructing a coherent theory: Children’s biological understanding of life and death. In M. Seigal & C. Peterson (Eds.), Children’s understanding of biology, health and ethics (pp. 71–98). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone. New York : Scholastic, 1999. Print. Rowling, J. K.
