“Mom, why are you sad?”, “Dad, when is grandpa coming back?”
When losing an elderly family member, a pet or a loved one who has suddenly passed away, these questions become important educational challenges to which parents, in the childhood of many children, are required to respond with knowledge and responsibility.
But how does the perception of death vary in children in the first years of life? What is right to say and how to do it? How should death be explained to children between the ages of 3 and 6?
The advice of Rosetta Panebianco, Pedagogist, Teacher and Pedagogical Coordinator at Petranova International from 1989 to 2022, offers us a range of approaches and ways to communicate death to children between 3 and 6 years old.
Death is an irreversible experience but it is an integral part of life. Learning to talk about this topic is essential for learning to manage the emotions, anxieties and fears that they arouse in children: being dependent on the family context, they often independently understand the emotional change in the environment around them and express themselves more or less express their concerns.
Denying to children the experience of death means distancing them from reality, allowing them to build an imaginary from which they will be disappointed, which will increase the processing time and understanding of the world and of their own experience.
Talking to children about death, on the other hand, means teaching the child to face life and, above all, this allows for an increase in educational complicity since they understand that they can talk about everything with their parents, without fear, without hesitation and without forgetting that the lack it can become presence in memory. This is why death explained to children is an opportunity for growth for the whole family.
WHAT EFFECTS DOES LOSS OF LOVE HAVE ON A CHILD?
- Fear of falling asleep
- Emotional block
- Regression
