explaining death to kids

Seraph

Tue, May 12 2009, 4:16 am

If there wasnt a family member who died that you'd need to explain death to a kid, from what age would you teach about the concept of death, either regarding to animals, or chagim, or what-not?
When you explain death for the first time, what do you say? How do you explain it? At what age do you give a more details explanation?

shalhevet

Tue, May 12 2009, 4:30 am

I explain things like that as they come up. I wouldn't sit down a two or three year old and say 'Mommy wants to tell you something...'

For parsha stories etc, they don't seem to ask. When you tell them Avraham or Moshe died it never seemed to raise any questions.

I wouldn't mix animals and humans - when each come up I would explain. This is what I explain from a very young age.

Animals: the animal was sick or old or got run over - this is a good lesson in road safety too - so its body stopped working and now it can't walk or eat or do anything anymore.

People (lehavdil): Explain briefly and in age appropriate way why they died - they were sick, old etc. The body can't do anything anymore. The person can't hear, talk, eat, walk etc because Hashem took the neshama out. The neshama goes up to shamayim to gan eden and gets presents for all the mitzvos the person did, and we bury the body in the ground.

alpidarkomama

Wed, May 13 2009, 3:19 am

Children will definitely ask questions when they are ready to learn. My daughter has been tremendously interested in the life cycle of animals, pets, people, etc since she was barely 3 years old. We talked about it a lot recently when our 19-year-old cat had to be put down. She handled it very gracefully. My almost-4-year-old son doesn't think much about it at all. I think the biggest mistake would be to change the subject or ignore the questions when they come up.

freidasima

Wed, May 13 2009, 7:02 am

I wait until they ask. If you have an open dialogue with your kids, they will come to you as soon as they have questions about anything or hear anything and you can set the record straight if some other kids have misinformed them.

Aribenj

Wed, May 13 2009, 9:42 am

I don't really have a rule of thumb.. I guess I just deal with each question as it arises and hope I'm doing the right thing...

For example, when DD was 2 my grandmother passed away. When she asked me where Bubby was I answered she was with Hashem, and that seemed to satisfy her.

A few months later when her fishy died, I didn't want to tell her that it was with Hashem so I told her it got sick and stopped living. I don't think she understood that, but she didn't ask and I let it be.

Then the other day she showed me a worm and told me she wanted to step on it and kill it (!!!! Totally unlike her!) and I explained to her that Hashem gave the worm life and we can't take the worm's life away because we're stealing from Hashem. Maybe not the most Jewish concept, but she understood. We had a whole discussion about the fragility of life and the importance of taking care of people and animals.

She doesn't understand that it's a sad thing though. But I'm guessing it will come. I wouldn't explain the whole thing at once unless they asked questions though.

Wed, May 13 2009, 3:56 pm

shalhevet wrote:

Shalhevet, I couldn't have said it better myself - and I mean that quite literally. I learned to use similar language from a very useful guidebook, by a funeral home manager turned therapist. I recommend this book to anyone struggling to explain death to children. It's written from a non-sectarian point of view, so Jewish readers may need to pick-and-choose a little bit, but overall it's a great resource.