“Grandma went to heaven.”🌌
How many times have you resorted to saying “she’s in heaven” when your child asked you where Grandma had gone?
We think this will make the child feel better, since they're still too young to understand the complexity of death. And most importantly, so they won't be afraid that death will happen to someone else.😱
But we don’t even consider the fact that around the age of ten, a child will inevitably come to understand death on their own—we’re just wired that way. By filling their heads with false ideas, we only make it harder for them to grasp the concept of death.
What are the right and wrong ways to do this? We asked our colleague about her own experiences:
🐶When the family dog died, my parents didn't say anything about it for three days. When I started asking about him, they said he had simply passed away.
💔She remembers very clearly the moment when she became aware of the reality of death: she must have been around nine years old; she was in her bedroom, getting ready for bed. And suddenly it dawned on her that her parents would die one day, just like in the action movies on TV where parents fall asleep in the evenings. She spent the rest of the night crying. She never confided this to her parents.
❤️🩹A few years later, however, she went through the death of her beloved guinea pig, just as one should. She cared for it while it was sick and fed it with a syringe when it could no longer eat. After it took its last breath, she and her dad held a small ceremony. She buried it in its favorite little house.
Children—even the youngest ones—are smarter than we think.👶 If we can’t talk about death ourselves, we’ll only create a barrier—and children will keep the questions that trouble them to themselves, until death becomes nothing more than a concept that they completely suppress. 💨
🙌To help children develop a healthy relationship with death, we have to start with ourselves. In their new article, Oleg and Adriana discuss how to talk to children about death and how to come to terms with it ourselves.🙌