Parenting Pointers: Explaining Death to Children

How To Explain Death To A Child

Learning how to explain death to a child is never easy to do, especially if you are already grieving on your own. It is vital to remember, however, that death is both natural and inevitable, making it an essential topic of conversation in your home. Following are several helpful tips for broaching this topic with your little ones that will prove exceedingly handy after the passing of a beloved family member or friend.

1. Eternal Sleep
Many people opt to explain death as the entering into an eternal sleep. This is in fact, a common explanation for death among people who do not hold strong religious beliefs or after-life expectations. Kids can take comfort in the fact that their loved ones are no longer subject to the many stresses of this world or any pain that they were experiencing before their departure.

2. Heaven
Heaven is perhaps one the most kid-friendly explanations of death, especially when attempting to address the death of a person that the child was particularly fond of or very close to. Parents simply tell kids that the deceased has traveled on to another world, which is far more pleasant than this one. Heaven is always described as a uniquely happy place in which people are free of sickness and pain. This alternative to endless sleep is usually a more preferable way for kids to envision their loved ones after they have gone away.

Many people eschew the idea of heaven when explaining death to their kids due to their personal or religious beliefs. It is important to remember, however, that parents also commonly foster a belief among their children in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and other non-existent entities in order to promote happiness. When weighing personal beliefs and known truths in the balance, heaven seems a fair compromise even for parents who do not have a belief in its existence.

3. Grieving Naturally
Far too often, adults feel that they must grieve privately in order to spare their children from seeing their own depth of emotion. Both grief and death, however, are natural processes and any natural emotional expressions stemming from either of these should not be suppressed. Your ability to cry in front of your children or express sadness in front of them will ultimately help them to effectively express their own grief in the future. This is far better than being taught to keep the emotions bottled up. Kids should be taught that it is perfectly acceptable to cry and perfectly natural to grieve, especially when grieving the loss of a loved one.

4. Appreciating Life

For the many negative aspects of discussing death with your child, there are also a few positive ones to address as well. The foremost among these is learning to develop a new appreciation for life. As children begin to view life as a very temporal process and one that can be ended at any moment, this will help them to develop a better understanding of appreciating those who are in their lives right now.

This can be very vital when there are many elder adults in the family. While children often enjoy spending time with these individuals, they can also find it very hard to relate to them or to their deteriorating physical conditions. When kids learn that death is imminent, especially for these individuals, they are far more likely to grasp the importance of spending time with loved ones while time is still available.

Darrell Clubs likes to write about parenting, saving money & www.dentalinsurance.net.