THINQon : Death: a child's point of view

The Living Room General Death: a child's point of view

THINQon is a platform for a more intelligent web. It aims to replace the ruling paradigm of the web – that of sharing and gathering information – with a sharing and achieving of understanding. Instead of the Q&A model it offers an experience. A platform for discovery of ideas, people, and yourself. Continue >

Damian Flint

Death: a child's point of view

Latest Post: April 5, 2011 at 5:41 PM

43 followers

By the time my son was four years old, he knew what growing was. He remembered being younger and he knew he would grow up to be an adult, and later grow old. He knew that 70 was old, and 100 was very old. He also knew that one does not grow indefinitely, one cannot be 1000 years old. But the concept of death was unknown to him, as is usually the case since the second half of the 20th century, as premature death is no longer a common occurrence. And I had no urge to expose him to this concept.

One day I played with him in the park, and when we were about to leave he noticed an inscribed tablet by the entrance. He asked me what it was, and I told him that the park had been dedicated to a famous poet. I told him my grandmother had known him when she was young. He asked me if we can meet him and I told him inadvertently that he was gone. His reaction clearly indicated that he had been puzzled about this subject for a long time and that my answer hit the right spot. He asked me: "so after someone becomes really old, he simply disappears?" I tried to change the subject, but his train of thought was already underway. "And after you die, are you then reborn?", he asked. Trying to keep this as open-ended as possible, especially since bringing up the subject was an accident in the first place, I told him that the Hindus believe in reincarnation. He asked me whether this belief was true, and I told him that nobody knows. I found it astonishing that he came up with this idea by himself.

Ever since that conversation, he seems to be preoccupied with death. He finds an opportunity to bring up the subject almost every day. He wants to know what may cause death. He tries to understand what death really is. The other day I showed him a book about dinosaurs, and one of the pictures in the book had a predator dinosaur by his slain prey. After we reached the end of the book, he wanted to flip back to that page: "the picture I want to see is not interesting, but I want to see it" he explained, apologetically, and gaped at the picture, trying to understand what he was seeing. This, of course, also introduced a new notion, that of killing.

Interestingly, while obviously curious about death, at the same time he seems indifferent to this possibility, he does not seem to be alarmed by it, nor does he think of it as a sad thing, more as an inevitability. While his point of view is immature and naive, one must appreciate that it is also innocent and unbiased. Is death a sad thing, apart from the loss it involves? Why does our heart miss a beat when we hear about the death of a distant relative which we haven't been in touch with for a long time? Why do we fear our own death, surely we won't feel any loss? At what stage do we adopt our understanding of death, and why?

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Emily Andrews	in "How to speak about death to our children and does one have to do it?"	(The Living Room)
Margaret Wells	in "Is it a good thing that all cities are becoming alike?"	(Travel)

Reply to:

Solveig Wright, Where to begin?

June 6, 2009 at 8:07 AM

33 followers

I wanted to respond, though these are obviously much larger questions which a few words can't do justice to...
So let me begin in a roundabout way. I am not a parent myself, but I did once receive a very interesting piece of advice from a mother of two, which was the following: When a young child asks you something difficult, it is important to first ask him what he thinks, because sometimes the most important part of your response is not giving new information but putting to rest certain fears or theories which the child has come up with himself. i.e. Unlike adults (at least most of the time), if you give a child a surprising new piece of information, this will not automatically supplant logically incompatible prior theories, but instead they will often combine together into some kind of hybrid account.

A disclaimer for what follows: I certainly don't mean to give a reading of a personal story which I wasn't there for, only to give my own personal reaction, understanding that it may really only amount to a kind of Rorshach test.

What strikes me very much is the word "disappears." Are you sure he doesn't think that all of a sudden, in the midst of walking down the street, people suddenly vanish? The eventual anxiety of such a worldview is related to the anxiety of death, of course, but it is importantly different -- as one can see in the psychology of adults living under oppressive regimes where there is really a constant and overwhelming threat of "disappearance."

Speaking generally, I think it's very difficult to say whether or not children are alarmed by things -- as, indeed, it is sometimes difficult in a profound way to say whether or not adults are. It takes a fairly well-developed sense of the world to feel that something does not fit. More often than not, as discussed in the post on gender stereotypes, even the most shocking facts can be absorbed, and the only effect is that one's world is circumscribed.

As for the questions you ask at the end: do you think there is really a moment when this happens? For that matter, at what stage can we be said to adopt our understanding of life?

Reply to: or

Damian Flint

June 6, 2009 at 8:42 PM

43 followers

Hi, Solveig,

First, it's good advice to listen first to what the child's preconceptions are. The problem in this case was that the crucial piece of information slipped out absentmindedly. He picked it up very quickly, which leads me to believe that he had prior thoughts about this. I tried to supply as little information as possible and let him lead.

His phrasing indicates that he does think this disappearance is sudden, or at least he thought so at some point. Who knows what he thinks... It seems that he doesn't really understand death, what it looks like, what it feels like, how does it come about, and is mystified by it. I can't know whether he is alarmed by death, I can only say that he does not seem alarmed. He is not excessively cautious about things that can cause death, such as crossing the street.

I try to think back how I first perceived death, and I can't tell for sure, it must have been at a very early age, perhaps as early as my son's. I must have seen depictions of so many violent deaths on television since then as to completely erase whatever early perceptions I may have had. It would be interesting to observe how he develops his understanding of this elusive concept.

Reply to: or

Mia Vialti

June 14, 2009 at 11:08 PM

67 followers

Damian (and Solveig),

you ask at the end,
Is death a sad thing, apart from the loss it involves? Why does our heart miss a beat when we hear about the death of a distant relative which we haven't been in touch with for a long time? Why do we fear our own death, surely we won't feel any loss? At what stage do we adopt our understanding of death, and why?

So I'll try also to give a first reply.
I think it's clear that death is something which we feel comes unjustly except at the end of a very long, healthy, happy life. Almost no civilization values an early death. Why, of course, is more complicated... Maybe as a first step, we could say life can be fundamentally experienced as a power, a force of creation. Notice the magnitude of the heavenly counterbalance which people throughout the ages have needed in order not to mourn their loss.

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day ;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light...."

Of course, one line of thinking about death identifies it with the general futility of human accomplishment, the frustration of human attemps to create. I wouldn't necessarily say this is the deepest issue, but it is certainly a major factor in melancholy. For instance, there's a story which Scaravelli tells about a faithful servant who one day meets Death in the marketplace of his city; Death tells the servant that in three days he will come for him. The servant goes to his master and begs for a horse to try to escape. The master loves the servant very much after all these years of loyal service, so he gives him his fastest horse. For three days the servant rides as fast as he can and finally he arrives at a dusty border outpost as night is falling on the third day. As he rides into the main square Death is waiting for him. I was very surprised seeing you in the city three days ago, says Death, because I had no idea how you would make it on time to our rendezvous here.

But this frustration is something which could just as easily be pinned on Fate, and does not seem to me to be particular to death.

What is deeper, I would say, is that if one is deeply immersed in one's business of living, in one's work and in one's joy, ideally one arrives at a place where one feels the magnitude of the task which one has set out to accomplish, even simply in living a good life and being a good human being, in making the lives of others better, in fighting whatever one personally finds to be the most aggregious darkness: and then insofar as one believes that living is worthwhile, death takes something away, destroys a certain possibility. It is not simply a loss but a destruction.

To follow Solveig's lead: I wonder at what point a child understands that she or he is alive?