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HOW CHILDREN COPE
- Children's understanding
of death and dying
Children's understanding of death and dying changes as they grow
and mature. Age parameters vary for each individual child, but most
children pass through a sequence of developmental stages.
- Preschoolers (Age 3 to 5)
These children see death as temporary and reversible. They believe
the dead live on under changed circumstances - either on a cloud
in a city called heaven or in a box under the ground connected to
other boxes by tunnels. Preschoolers ask many questions about how
one lives on. No matter how well death is explained, many will persist
in their belief about its reversibility. These children are likely
to be literal and concrete in their thinking.
- Latency/Early Elementary (Ages 6 to
8)
Children in this developmental stage see death as a person or spirit
that comes to get you if you aren't fast or clever enough to escape.
From their perspective, three groups of people die: the elderly
and the handicapped (because they can't run fast enough) and the
klutzes. Klutzes are people who die, who are neither elderly nor
handicapped. In an effort to make themselves feel different, and
therefore safe, children will often find some specific way, frequently
negative, to differentiate themselves from people who die.
- Preadolescents (Age 9-11)
These children have more adult understanding of death, seeing it
as final, universal, and irreversible. They are interested in rituals
and concerned about how the world will change because of the death
of a particular person. This age group is frequently described as
having the easiest time dealing with death and dying because they
tend to intellectualize as a way of coping with the experience.
They can sometimes sound crass and uncaring.
- Adolescents (12+)
Just when adolescents are being asked to take responsibility for
their own lives, they are confronted by experiences that challenge
their belief in their own immortality. They often engage in risk-taking
behavior, seeming to test the limits of that immortality. Most adolescents
are embarrassed when a parent or brother or sister dies; they don't
want to be different from their friends. Their grief at times of
death and dying tends to be expressed with peers rather than with
family members, often causing family members to believe that the
adolescent is not grieving.
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