Childhood, Children, and Death

The issues surrounding how children understand and respond to death have profound implications for their healthy development into adulthood. Multiple factors influence their cognitive understanding of death, including chronological age and developmental capacity. How well they will cope constructively with losses in childhood is a complex combination of internal and external forces, with important implications for professionals and parents.

Scholarly commentary on children's understanding of, and reactions to, death reaches back to the 1930s and 1940s, with the publications of Paul Schilder and David Wechsler, Sylvia Anthony, and Maria Nagy. How and when children develop a mature understanding of the finality of death, how their reactions and responses differ from those of adults, and what methodologies best accommodate them in healthy grieving are topics that have received increasing interest in the research and clinical communities in the past 3 decades.

Child's Understanding of Death

Most discussions of children's understanding of death begin with the models of childhood development of Erik Erikson or Jean Piaget and the characteristic tasks inherent in subsequent stages of development. It is generally accepted that by the age of 7 years, most children have a mature concept of death. It has long been thought that a mature concept includes the four components of (1) universality, the fact that everyone dies, that death is the inevitable end to every living being's life, and that it is unavoidable; (2) irreversibility, the understanding that once you are dead, you cannot come back to life; (3) nonfunctionality, that when people die they can no longer engage in biological activities like eating, talking, breathing, walking, or laughing; and (4) causality, that death happens because of certain and identifiable biological reasons.

More recently, two additional concepts have been proposed, by Lynne Ann DeSpelder and Albert Lee Strickland, and Mark W. Speece and Sandor B. Brent, respectively. Those concepts are personal mortality, the realization that “I will die too,” and noncorporeal continuation, the nonempirical notion of some kind of existence beyond the physical.

From birth to approximately 2 years of age, corresponding to the sensorimotor period in Piaget's model of cognitive development, the child is developing senses and motor abilities and begins to build bonds with what John Bowlby referred to as the “mother-figure.” Pioneering work on loss and attachment by John Bowlby and others about infancy and abandonment laid the groundwork for a clearer understanding of how deeply infants and very young children understand, if not death, at least goneness.

Piaget's preoperational period includes ages 2 to 4, a time of intense egocentric thought, and ages 4 to 6, when more socialization, speech development, and problem-solving abilities develop. During this time many children become curious about and interested in death, through the experience of insects and animals, cartoons and children's books, or the deaths of pets or grandparents. While struggling with a comprehensive understanding of the finality of death, it is not unusual for children this age to engage in “magical thinking,” that is, the belief that their actions contribute directly to events that objectively they cannot control. They may believe they “caused” someone to go away and, subsequently, that they can “cause” the person to return.

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