An ongoing concern: Helping children comprehend death

Abstract

This article addresses the need for anticipatory guidance about death and death education with young children. Children often experience the death of an immediate family member before the age of ten. This number increases if one considers the loss of friends, pets, and other loved ones. However, children experience a death with little or no anticipatory guidance or knowledge about death. Anticipatory guidance can assist the child in having a better understanding of a death when it occurs. Talking about death with children can be difficult for adults. However, it is important to address the topic and realize the impact anticipatory guidance in relation to death can have in assisting with childhood bereavement, anticipatory grief, and anticipatory adaptation. By providing anticipatory education related to death symptoms such as grief, anger, and/or fear, regressive or aggressive behaviors can be prevented or lessened when a death occurs. Age appropriate developmental levels for understanding the concept of death, resources for death education, and literature that can be used for death education are presented. Any resource used for death education with children should be carefully reviewed by the adult for its appropriateness prior to its use.

What Bereaved Children Want to Know About Death and Grief

“…Integrating death education into school curricula can be an effective approach to pre-emptively supporting children to cope with bereavement. Doing so provides preparatory guidance, which equips children with knowledge, language, and coping strategies that can be drawn upon when a child faces loss (McGuire et al, 2013). Although not currently standard practice in Australian schools (Kennedy et al, 2017), international death education curricula typically incorporate information that facilitates recognition and understanding of grief, language to identify and explain grief, and strategies to cope with grief and related experiences (Dawson et al, 2023;Friesen et al, 2020).…”

Strengths and Weaknesses of Children Witnessing Relatives with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

“…Higher levels of spirituality and a mature concept of death improve children's emotional well-being and enable them to elaborate on the idea of finitude [49][50][51][52]. Given that children's scores on the TDRS-C scale correlate negatively with the positive dimensions of affectivity (PANAS-C) and prosociality (SDQ) and positively with the negative behavioral dimensions of SDQ, we hypothesize that school-based death education programs, which promote discussion of the existential issues related to spirituality and transcendental dimensions, may promote self-awareness, emotional resilience, compassion, and empathy among children [23,[53][54][55].…”

What Do Preschool Children in India Understand About Death?: An Exploratory Study

“…Furthermore, the study also suggested that it is possible to elicit preschool children's understanding of death in a nonthreatening manner. Thus, instead of avoiding discussing the inevitable concept of death with a child, parents and other adults can and should be able to talk about it and help the child understand death (McGuire, McCarthy, & Modrcin, 2013).…”