I HAVE NEVER HAD any problems discussing sex with my seven-year-old son. Like his friends, he has a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of how babies are made. Indeed, despite the widely held view that parents find sex an awkward subject to discuss with their children, most of us do a reasonably good job of it. The
real taboo subject these days is not sex, but death. “What happens to a body after it is buried?” is a question that squeamish fathers like me find difficult to answer. I have talked to parents who have given their seven to ten-year-old kids extensive briefings on French kissing, petting and on why some grown-ups are attracted to others from their own sex — yet who have balked at engaging their children on the subject of death.
Paradoxically, young children — those aged eight and under — are often more interested in death than sex. Their parents’ reticence is partly responsible; children intuitively grasp that there is something special about this experience. At the same time, the meaning that children attach to death is not dominated by the sense of loss, of pain, of trauma and of finality that shapes the imagination of adults.
As far as children are concerned, death is not a big deal, as is evident from their down-to-earth, pragmatic questions about it: “What’s it like inside the coffin?”; “What do you eat when you are dead?”; or “Can the dead see us?” Of course, this does not last for ever; by the age of 13 or 14, children internalise adult inhibitions, including the idea that death is a “difficult” issue.
Yet if younger children are not awestruck by death, why do adults make such a big deal when it comes to talking about it to them? Many parents insist that this is a complex subject to communicate because “children find it very difficult to deal with the pain of loss”.
Witness the recent controversy following the publication of Judith Kerr’s Goodbye Mog, the 16th and final book in the series in which the eponymous hero dies. Cue much discussion about how “upsetting” children would find this.
Dr Tony Walter, a sociologist at the University of Reading, believes that the confusion surrounding deliberations about death are more likely to reflect parental anxieties than the incapacity of children to engage with this subject. Walter, author of On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief, thinks that parents who naturally regard death as a uniquely serious and sensitive subject are often taken aback by the apparently insensitive reaction of their child. Children with a short attention span soon lose interest in the “now I am going to talk very seriously” lecture mode of their parents. Yes, kids can be sad, too. But after a minute or two of sadness they can be playing on the trampoline or demanding to watch television.
There are many reasons why children do not take death as seriously as adults. “Death is not very different from all the other things that children are in the process of discovering,” Walter argues. Almost everything is new and mysterious on a child’s voyage of discovery. In a world where so much of what adults take for granted is strange to a child, death is just one more problem of which to make sense.
This apparently casual attitude towards death is influenced by an imagination that lacks a sense of finality. Talk about death often provokes the response: “But if you die, you will come back later.” Their vivid imagination allows children to get around the usual obstacles of life. Many of them also have strong ideas about how people come back to life. This refreshingly naive sense of immortality is underwritten by an undeveloped sense of time. As a result, the idea that someone has gone away “for ever” is not necessarily interpreted as for ever. At a stretch, for ever may mean until next year. This lack of a sense of finality is continually reinforced by the manner in which the media and children’s books represent the issue of death.
Cartoons and children’s films often portray death in an unserious manner and frequently communicate the impression that it is a temporary prelude to a return to life. Cartoon characters often have humorous or manifestly unnatural deaths before they return to the storyline. Some of the central characters in children’s books — Snow White, Sleeping Beauty — avoid a tragic fate. These princesses are wakened out of a “sleep” by a kiss.
Parental reluctance towards talking about death does little to challenge this weak grasp of finality. On the contrary, the language that parents use to account for death helps children to avoid facing up to the issue. We often talk about someone who has “passed away” or who has “gone to sleep”. Children who take words literally will not interpret the phrase “losing” someone as anything more than a temporary setback. That is why, in the end, using the D-word cannot be avoided.
In previous centuries, death was a normal part of daily life; children inevitably knew or heard of someone who had died. Many also learnt about death as part of their religious education. The idea that nobody lives for ever was absorbed as part of a body of belief that informed the life of a child. Such religious beliefs in death, claims Walter, meant “that children had the answers before the problem arose”.
In today’s secular world most children have an opportunity to reflect on the answers only after they and their family have confronted the problem. Indeed, most advice on this subject involves talking to children facing bereavement. There are some very good children’s books and information leaflets for parents who have to explain the death of a loved one to a child. But any discussion on death need not be confined to the experience of bereavement.
Nor, clearly, does such a discussion have to be informed by your belonging to a faith community. Atheist, agnostic, active or lapsed church member, death is a subject through which to communicate individual and family values. It is a discussion worth having because it helps to prepare children to deal with loss and bereavement in the future. But another, more compelling reason for discussing death with children is that it means that you must also talk about life, its meaning and purpose. When children learn about a dead relative or friend, the first question they ask after “how did she die?” is “what was she like?” Through talking about the dead, parents have an opportunity to discuss what people have achieved in life and the codes that they lived by. The lives of friends and especially close relations is part of the child’s family story. Not only is this a story that children love to discuss, but through telling this story parents are also able to transmit their idea of what their family is about. In that way we can do our bit to help children find some of the answers to a problem that they will inevitably have to confront.
Talking about death with children is one of the most rewarding ways of reflecting on life.
Frank Furedi is a professor of sociology at the University of Kent
On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief, by Dr Tony Walter, is published by Open University Press (£18.99)
