I’m just curious. I have no kids, I’ve never been around them that much, and so I don’t know a whole lot about them, but I was wondering if there’s an age at which they begin to ask questions about mortality and the like. Growing up on a farm some animal (dog, cat, duck, cow, peacock, whatever) was always dying and I had a lot of very old relatives as well as a babysitter who took me to funerals and made me kiss the bodies, so I don’t really remember not knowing what death was; neither do I remember when Heaven was explained to me. A good friend is currently trying to explain this to a 70+ year old man who works with who’s mentally retarded and has a mental age (I know that term is out of favor but I don’t mean it disrespectfully) of about 6 and in him telling me about this I started wondering about kids. (The old retarded man is in poor health and of course having to come to grips with his own mortality through his childlike mind so he has lots of questions.)
Obviously if there’s a death in the close family or even of a pet then it probably hastens the questions a bit, and of course it varies from child to child, but I was wondering if there’s a general age of curiosity on the matter when there’s not a major stimulus.
My son wanted answers around 6/7. It does not need to be a major stimulus. Even watching something on TV may provoke it.
The question will invariably come up as to why someone they love has to die. It is as hard to give a six year old a satisfying answer as it is to give one to yourself.
My three-year old has asked about it. Someone at daycare had used to word die and he used it with me. Basically on the drive home one day, he got mad and told me to die. So I asked him if he knew what it meant and he said no. So, since it’s been raining a lot lately and we’ve had lots of dead worms laying out on the sidewalk, I used them as an analogy. I said that the worms’ bodies had stopped working because some of them had been squished while others didn’t get the water they needed and dried out so much they couldn’t survive. He asked if that happened to people, and I said that, yes, that’s what it means to die - your body stops working and can’t start again. Then he asked me not to die.
It was a weird conversation and I’m not even certain I handled it right, but it seemed to satisfy his curiosity without scaring or confusing him. That’s what’s so hard about those conversations - you want to be honest and accurate, but at the same time, you don’t want to confuse with too much detail or scare the bejesus out of them.
I don’t know because I never gave her lil’ ass a chance. I started hittin’ her with the truth from the time she was a babbling baby. Because I was traumatized as a child by talk of a burning hell. I believed the nice people at my Sunday School, and I truly believe that talk of hell gets deep into the psyche of a child and can really mess them up.
My daughter is incredibly strong willed, so I feel confident that she will be able to make her own decisions in the future, but she knows very well what her dad and I think is the truth, and she knows how I feel about science (which she loves). Good luck to her!
Apparently when I was five or six, I got upset because I hated the idea of death and didn’t want to die. Then my grandma talked to me and I got over it, or something. I don’t really remember.
My daughter started asking at around 3 as well. She would pose some really thought-provoking, philosophical questions that really taxed our ability to respond, and respond in a way appropriate for a 3 year old.
So far, it comes up at about 3 or 4, then it comes up again at about 7. This was the case with both my sons.
Eldest, who is 9, seems to be content with his current understanding of death and is now fully occupied with the subject of sex. Youngest, who is 7, occasionally has a sort of terror seizure at the idea that I might die; then a couple days later he wants to discuss the matter in very dispassionate terms.
I suspect though that Youngest’s latest interest in the subject is related to the fact that the mother of one of his little friends died recently and unexpectedly, and he has had a sort of approach-avoidance reaction to the whole thing.
Neither of them has shown very much interest in his own demise, though Eldest’s original introduction to the subject was a rather lurid killing of a child which was much in the press, and he was particularly upset at the notion that a child should die. Dying, in his mind, was for old and sick people and the idea that a child might die knocked him for a loop.
My 6, almost 7 year-old year old has been talking about heaven and death a lot. Not her own death in a physical sense, but talking about heaven and how in heaven we’ll all be a family again and how does someone get to be an angel and can you be an angel if sometimes you are a little bit bad and not perfectly good. (This is kinda freaky 'cause my husband and I are totally atheists. But we go with the “well some people believe thus-and-such” system and it seems to work fine for her purposes.)
My 4 year old likes to pretend to shoot things and talk about houses burning down and people dying in volcanoes…dark little bastard, now that I think of it…but he’s not really curious about it as such.
So…somewhere in there.