So for example, if your child asks you, “When are you going to die?” You can say, “I try to take very good care of myself and to be careful and plan to live a very long time until I’m quite old,” Poltorak suggested. And you don’t need to get into too much detail with kids this age, said Beville Hunter. Don’t brush off their questions even if they make you uncomfortable, said Poltorak. So use the term “died,” even if it feels harsh. She may think, “Did they go away somewhere? Are they on a trip? Did they pass over the border into Canada? It can just potentially risk greater confusion and lack of understanding,” said Poltorak. If you say something like, “Grandpa passed away” instead of “died,” it may confuse your child. Dunya Poltorak, a pediatric medical psychologist in private practice in Birmingham, Mich.
Children in the 3-6 age range have very concrete thinking, said Dr. How do I answer their many, many questions about death?ĭo not use euphemisms. Because it’s straightforward, many preschoolers can understand that when you’re dead, your arms and legs don’t move anymore, and your heart stops beating. Though children pick up these concepts at different ages, depending on their cognitive abilities and their life experiences, at 4, the subconcept they tend to understand first is nonfunctionality, Beville Hunter said. Sally Beville Hunter, Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor at University of Tennessee, Knoxville: nonfunctionality (your body doesn’t work anymore), universality (all living things die), irreversibility (once you die, you can’t come back to life) and inevitability (you can’t avoid death). There are four subconcepts of death that psychologists have identified, explained Dr. What do they understand about death at 4? And what adults sometimes don’t realize, because we’re inured to it, is that our kids are surrounded by death all the time: Cartoon characters die, the leaves on the trees die, an ant they smushed at the playground is dead.īecause they’re already so curious about the world, they see our reactions to their questions about death - our faces may blanch - and they pick up on that and want to dig deeper. Lauren Knickerbocker, Ph.D., a child psychologist at N.Y.U. Preschool is the age of “why” in general, said Dr. Why do kids start asking about death in preschool? But when I started talking to other parents, I learned that their preschoolers were also asking tons of questions about death at awkward moments. I tried to calmly match her tone and answer her honestly, but sometimes you just want to eat your salad without contemplating your own mortality.Īt the time, I was slightly worried that there was something wrong with her - at best she was a proto-goth who would be really into the Cure as a teenager and at worst, her questions meant she had some troubling anxiety that was emerging through a fixation on death. We’d be sitting at dinner and she’d ask a barrage of questions in a completely neutral voice: “When are you going to die? Is Grandma going to die first because she’s old?” And on and on. What was jarring was her matter-of-fact tone. These questions were apropos of nothing we hadn’t had a death in the family or lost a pet.
When our older daughter was 4, it seemed like she was asking us about death constantly.
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