💀 TREE 244: Adults lie to children about death because adults can’t handle death

One.

The walking tree has arrived.

Two.

You want to see dark art? Hang out with a primary school kid.

My littlest sister used to play games where disasters killed parents and left children as abandoned orphans. It was like A Series of Unfortunate Events but without the funny parts.

A boy in Christine’s Sunday school class once put so many rocks and guts into his self-initiated drawing of a stoning that the felt-tip pens destroyed the paper. (He was a normal healthy kid then. He’s a normal, healthy adult now.)

I worked with children and young people for 25+ years. Generally, they find death troubling AND they want to talk about it. They don’t need everything to be nice. They want to understand the truth at a level their brains can handle.

Here are my tips for talking to little kids about death:

• Have pets. They’ll die before you want them to you’ll learn how to deal with a broken heart.

• Use true, understandable words like ‘die’ and ‘dead’. Kids are concrete thinkers. ‘Grandma passed on’ makes no sense. ‘Grandma fell asleep forever’ is terrifying.

• Don’t lie. Saying that Mr Pusskins is in heaven when Mr Pusskins is in the incinerator might make you feel better in the moment. But it does your child no good and undermines your long-term credibility.

• Show your emotions. Let your kids show their emotions. (They do it weirdly sometimes.)

• Be prepared to answer the same uncomfortable questions about death many times. Kids, like all humans, don’t get the whole picture all in one go.

• Kids don’t feel safe when you bullshit them about death. Kids feel safe when you envelop them in love as you help them understand the truths they instinctively know about death.

Three.

When someone you love dies, it’s sad. This song is sad. And beautiful. And sad.

The kids are alright.
Jeff