WHAT’S harder to talk to your kids about than sex? For many families, it’s death. Some of us feel as though telling our children the truth about death will scare them or leave them psychologically scarred.
Our anxieties about death feed the trouble we have talking about it.
Our religious beliefs might point us to an afterlife — but that doesn’t make it any easier to focus on our own mortality. We seem to accept that good parents will eventually initiate “the talk” with their kids about reproduction — but most parents still leave any talk about death until it becomes unavoidable.
Whether prompted by the loss of a grandparent, the death of a pet, a news story about the fatal illness of a celebrity or simply a walk past a cemetery, worries about death arise early in life. Here’s how to talk to your children about it:
1. It’s OK to wait for a life event that raises the question of death for your kids. You don’t have to rush to bring up the topic, just resolve not to avoid it.
2. When an experience — or a question from your son or daughter — brings death center stage, take that as the invitation to increase their comfort with it.
3. I have found children fear isolation and abandonment more than anything else. They commonly worry most about whether a parent might die. Reassure them that after anyone dies, the people who loved that person help one another and make sure they’re OK.
4. Remind them what hasn’t changed around them. For example, you could say, “We’re lucky everyone in our family is healthy. We’re here for one another.”
5. Honor the power of memory. Tell children that as long as anyone who has lost a pet, friend or relative remembers the relationship, there will still be a powerful connection between them. Love doesn’t die when the object of the love is gone.
6. Give them the gift of knowing that everyone leaves a mark on the world that can never go away, like a thread woven into an infinite tapestry.
7. Share whatever elements of your faith have sustained you when contemplating death.
Keith Ablow, MD, is a psychiatrist, Fox News Channel contributor and founder of livingthetruth.com. Contact him at info@keithablow.com.
