How can I talk to my child about death? And should I? Feminist Advice Friday
A reader wonders if her child is too young to understand death.
A reader asks…
Our elderly neighbor just died. My four-year-old liked her, but she was not a major part of her life. I’m wondering if she’s too young to understand death, or what I should do. She’s a pretty anxious kid, and I don’t want to terrify her. But I’ve also read some of your writing on grief, and I really don’t want to be the mom who teaches her kid to ignore the bereaved.
What do you think?
My answer:
Please don’t lie to her or ignore the loss. She deserves an explanation from a loving mother. This is a “safe” loss in many ways—one that’s not particularly close or painful. So it’s a great starting point for discussing life, death, and everything in between.
During my daughter’s first year of school, my daughter had the kindest, gentlest, most talented preschool teacher you could possibly imagine. She formed meaningful bonds with every child, and seemed to intuitively know what they needed. She ran an animal sanctuary. She was everything a human being should be*.
And then her daughter died (you can learn more about her exceptional daughter here). It was devastating, and scary, and deeply unfair. For most of the small children in the class, it was their first experience with death.
My child wasn’t so lucky. She had already watched us bury her sister and grandmother. Death has been a familiar companion to her since toddlerhood. Our experiences with grief taught us how isolating it can be, so naturally, we told our daughter everything and went to this precious young woman’s funeral.
My daughter was the only classmate who attended. The other parents worried about the effect the funeral had on their children. They wanted to protect their kids from this tragedy. Some never told their children that their beloved teacher’s child had died. When she returned to the classroom a few months later, she returned to children who had no understanding of the magnitude of the loss, and no understanding of why their teacher had left them for so long.
These children’s loving parents wanted to protect them. I get that. But not every child has the privilege of being protected from death. And this protection comes at the expense of one of our most important human goods: empathy.
Children cannot empathize with someone else’s loss if they don’t know about it. This teacher poured so much love into these kids, but their parents were too afraid to do the necessary and hard work to show up in return for the teacher.
And even so, some of the kids still developed behavior problems because of the massive disruption in their lives—and maybe even because they had no explanation for, or understanding of, their teacher’s long absence. So the attempt to protect these kids from the sadness of death didn’t even work.
We have to teach our kids about death because death is a fact of life, and we never know when it will become relevant to us. Learning about death is the first step toward being able to show compassion toward the bereaved. In our culture, the bereaved are often abandoned with their grief, and if we want our children to turn into the sort of people who run toward suffering people rather than away from them, we must not show fear in the face of suffering. That begins with talking to them about death early, in age-appropriate ways. If you hide from the fact of death, it won’t protect your child; it will only confuse them, and will ultimately cause them to glean information from less reliable sources.
Here are my rules for talking to kids about death:
Know that death-avoidance is a privilege
When our daughter died, we lost more than half of our friends. I know it’s because they didn’t know what to say or do, and so they just said nothing. We still have family members who won’t say her name, or mention her loss. It enrages me, and it intensifies my pain.
This behavior of avoiding the bereaved begins in childhood, when children’s parents avoid talking to them about death, and refuse to instruct them about the moral obligation to support the bereaved.
No one wants to scare or hurt their children. I know lots of parents who think that, because their kids are unusually anxious or sensitive, they need to avoid talking about death. The reality is that there is no great time to tell a child that they will die, and that so will everyone they love. The longer you wait, though, the harder it gets—and the more likely it becomes that your child will imbibe harmful information from some other source.
Avoiding death is a privilege. There are children in Gaza surrounded by it. Kids across the globe who have buried parents and siblings. No one stopped to think about their anxiety, their sensitivity. Moreover, the cultural tendency to avoid death leaves these kids more alone and less supported, as evidenced in my vignette about my daughter’s teacher. Children who avoid death become adults who have little practice with death, and who therefore avoid the bereaved, compounding their pain.
Start small
The death talk is a lot like the sex talk, in that there should never be just one, singular conversation during which you address everything. Your child is not going to ask you everything in a single conversation, and it’s ok if you need to go back and revise. This is an ongoing discussion. Making it such reduces the stigma, and makes death feel like a safe thing to talk about.
So start by answering a simple question, or answering honestly when someone is sick or dies. Be age-appropriate, using simple, clear language, and offering more information as your child grows and seeks to learn more.
Don’t anticipate questions—listen for them
A lot of parents have a list of things they think their kids will ask. So they bombard their kids with answers to those questions.
Kids, though, think differently from adults. Your child is not you. They might be curious about practical matters, like how you get a dead person out of the house or whether it costs money to bury someone. They might have simple misunderstandings about language— “Wait, so they pass away like disappear?” Focus on one simple topic, then listen carefully. Let your child lead you.
If your child has questions, they are ready for the answers to those questions.
Be clear, direct, and specific, with no euphemisms
Kids are literal. They don’t understand adult euphemisms. Using euphemisms increases fear of death, and makes it more likely that your child will have a scary misunderstanding. Don’t say a person goes to sleep forever or passes away. Say they died. Don’t say they’ve gone home or gone on. Your language must be literal.
Talk about grief and compassion
When my mother died, my daughter saw how sad I was. I used it as a teachable moment, to tell her that all people experience these sorts of losses, and that it is her obligation as a human being to show them love—not to ignore them.
Then model compassion to your child. Life is full of opportunities to do so. Take a meal to the neighbor whose husband died. Go to the friend’s funeral. Call to check in on your loved ones. Let your child see you doing this. Talk about why it’s important to do this.
Break the cycle of people being cruel to the bereaved.
Don’t tell them what to feel
Parents sometimes fear their kids’ negative reactions, so they tell them not to worry about death, or that they will live forever. Don’t do this. Offer realistic reassurance: “I am planning to be here for a long time. I take good care of myself. And no matter what happens, I know that love never dies.”
Kids are allowed to have their own feelings about death, and arguing with them about those feelings will only intensify their power.
Frame life as special
The thing that makes life so special is that, as far as we know anyway, it’s the only one we get. It doesn’t last forever. This creates a sense of urgency to do as much as we can with it. We think life is precious because it ends.
Not all adults seem to like this message. But every child I’ve talked to does. Tell them their life is special and rare. Tell them every moment matters. Kids love thinking about rare things—whether it’s those little collector’s bags that sometimes come with “rare” trinkets, or their very existence.
Offer reassurance that love never dies
Children worry about their parents dying. This is natural. Your child deserves a clear message that your love will live on forever, and maybe even some signs to look for. When you do die, your child may remember these conversations and gain great reassurance from them. I tell my daughters constantly that my love will always be with them, even if I am not.
I also talk a lot about love as our most important legacy. Every single one of us has the capacity to do good in the world, to love others, to leave behind a legacy of kindness and decency. This is the way we live on. Encourage your child to think about how people they have never met left something behind for them—how their ancestors survived long enough to make their parents, and then them. And how in this way, all of the people who came before them live on. Teach them to live up to that legacy—and push back on its shortcomings—by doing as much good as they can.
Life is a gift. Kids must learn to use it well.
Develop meaningful answers about life after death
I don’t really know what I believe about the afterlife, if anything at all. I think the idea of my body returning to the Earth and feeding the many life forms I have always loved is quite beautiful. I’ve found many kids love this story. A script I have used with my kids is this: “I don’t really know what happens to our spirits after we die, but I do know that our bodies return to the Earth. Tiny animals break down our bodies, so that we can nourish plants and other animals. And in this way, we continue to live on because we are all connected.”
I also like to talk about life before birth. I remind my kids that “life” before we were born wasn’t scary. It just…was. And that if there is no traditional after life, it’s exactly like life before birth, which is a fine thing.
*We are still in touch with her, and if you are moved by her story and have some spare cash you’d like to be rid of, I urge you to donate to her farm sanctuary. You can find it here.
Readers, what are your tips and tricks for talking to a child about death?
My five year old has been asking so many questions about this topic. Death, what happens to our bodies, spirits, heaven, everything. Thank you for this guidance.
When my dad died my twins were 5, my son loved my dad greatly and I told him we were all sad about our loss and grandpa was sad to leave us so soon but that he didn't have a choice. I also told him that we are responsible about living a good life because we don't have control over the length but we have control over the way we live. He agreed with me that we had a great granpa who loved us greatly and that was a gift of life many people don't get. Nearly six yaers after we grief sometimes but we also have a ton of great memories.