pauraque_bk | Excerpt from "Explaining Death to Children".

Some time ago I got Explaining Death to Children ed. Earl A. Grollman out of the library. I just saw it on a random shelf and thought it looked interesting. Published in 1967, it's a compilation of articles discussing the ways children relate to and understand death in various cultures and situations.

When I was in the Egyptian section of the Met with

sistermagpie and

_hannelore in November, I was trying to tell them about this part of the book that described how young children who have not been raised with any particular religious beliefs nonetheless come up with specific concepts on their own that are very reminiscent of familiar religions. The ancient Egyptians supposed that the dead must get hungry, so they provided them with the means to eat; in the absence of other instruction, modern four-year-olds come to the same conclusion.

Before I returned the book I typed out a lengthy excerpt from this section. I stupidly forgot to write down the name of the psychologist who actually wrote this part; I should go back to the library and check.

Child A was a boy three and a half years old. In the past six to eight months he had asked his parents spontaneously when he would die or they would die. [...] During this period, the maternal grandfather died. [...]

Injuries which may cause death, especially from a "hard fall," are dramatized by play with toys or the child actually taking the role of the victim. Each time, people return from the dead; I suggested that they may not, or then that they cannot, and the child insisted the opposite. To support his case he said that he saw a dead cat in a sewer and later it was not dead. [...] If it is a child who dies, it continues to grow. The dead may get hungry and they must eat. Excremental functions continue after death. The child plays this out with toy bears he has shot, killed, and buried. They then continue their vital functions. They can also walk about. Some objects may remain motionless and not eat or speak but they are the ones whom the child wants to deprive of functions. Death is reversible. Life is a set of functions which one performs and which one may be deprived of. It is "death" to lose functions, but the functions are restored as before or even bigger than during life.

Child B was a girl four years and four months old. Within the year her paternal grandmother had died of chronic heart disease, a broken hip, and old age. [...]

The child's play was about children being lost, frightened, and even killed. [...] The subject of being dead and what happens to people who die focused on going to a graveyard in a box. After a while the dead come out of the box. The dead person does not remain there. While focused on killing animals, the play was restricted only to those to be eaten. Those that are not eaten may die and they come back to life. Animals may go to a hospital when ill and may die, but the expressed belief is that good animals or "nice ones" come back. Dead animals can take medicine and be resored. This was played out in considerable detail. The child played that she was good after pretending to be dead, which is a clear implication that she will return from the dead. [...] The belief is clear in respect to the return to life; particularly if one is good, it is believed that dying may be warded off or the effects of dying may be reversed. The anxiety about dying is thus reduced or modified.

Child C was a boy three years and eight months old. While driving home with his parents one day, he witnessed a cat in its death struggles. The child's immediate fears were for his own cat. "What happens to cats and where do they go when they die?" were his repeated questions. [...] The child later asked who Mozart was. On learning the composer was dead, the child provided a long list of people, asking whether they were dead or alive. He repeatedly asked, "Where do dead people go?" The grave as a hole in the ground held his interest. [...]

The boy's play is particularly concerned with an animal that he shot, killed, and then took to a graveyard and buried. He did not know what happened after this until he thought of the animal being hungry. It could not come back, but it could eat earth. A variety of other creatures and objects were killed and buried, were hungry and ate. They could also talk although dead. [...] If he had to die, he would "go", but only with his mother and father, but he had to be sure, however, to come back. He knows that if people die they stay away, but he himself will return.

Child D was a four-year-old boy whose grandfather had died during the previous year in a distant city. [...]

Sometimes [in his play] people are killed with a knife; however, if you take the knife out they live again. He once saw a dead bee, but he knew that it could come alive and that was why he did not bury it. "People get buried because they are no good." [...]

Thoughts which children express without any organized play session and which can be casually collected include the following: "Before you are born, you're dead, then you get born and you live again till you're very old, then you die and maybe you become just a little thing and then you start all over again"[...]

An elaborate system of psychological defenses may be observed. At this period of life the logic used is implicit. A paradox such as "when the dead are hungry they eat," or "those who are killed return to life," needs no further explanation so far as the child is concerned. [...] Death is reconstituted to become a liberation rather than its opposite. What limitations life may have imposed are transcended in death. [...]

Morality is introduced very early by the child in the belief that the bad die before the good. The good are rewarded by a return from the dead. The bad remain dead. [...]

Taken in its totality, the reaction to the discovery of death, which defines fate as the uncertainty it is, leads both the child and the man into initiating an active civilizing process. He begins to propitiate and conciliate those who are superior, who are believed to direct and influence the course of events and his life. [...] Thus defined, the child has fashioned a religion that he practices. The institutional aspects follow later in life. [...]

What is remarkable is not that children arrive at adult views of the cessation or life, but rather how tenaciously throughout life adults hold to the child's beliefs and how readily they revert to them. [...]

Actually, religious beliefs develop not so much by way of indoctrination as by the inevitable, specific, emotional conflicts of early childhood. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how even a child subject to the most irreligious indoctrination would escape them. Religiosity thus plays a fundamental role in human experience. The significant, essential, and primary basis of religious belief is thus established far in advance of the final edifice, which, without it, would never have either its remarkable durability or its universality.

This was followed by transcripts of the summarized conversations.

ETA: Ha! I'd forgotten what the image for "impressed" was in my moodtheme. (Maybe I'm not impressed that often.) Ah, Apache Chief. *wipes tear*