by Linda Weatherseed

Talking with children about death is one of the hardest conversations a parent will ever have. After all, a parent’s primary instinct is to protect their children from suffering, and death is a scary subject, fraught with peril if misunderstood.

Parents frequently ask us how to explain the death of a family member to a young child. We tell them that it is very important to be as honest as possible, bearing in mind their child’s age. This is because a child’s ability to understand death depends very much upon his or her developmental stage. Preschoolers, for example, are unable to understand the finality of death. They believe that death is reversible and that the person who died can come back or can be visited.

One mother I recently worked with had an unusually difficult time trying to explain her husband’s sudden death to her five-year-old boy. She thought the news might go easier if she avoided using the word “died,” so she told him, “Daddy has gone to sleep.”