Coping with Grief - Elementary Students

How Children View Death - Pre-K to Grade Six

 A child's understanding of death and response to grief depends on many factors, including age, personality, level of maturity, previous experience with death, relationship to the person who died, and family background (involving values, beliefs, family communication, and support).  Like an adult, each child reacts in his or her own way. The better you know about the individual child, the better you will be able to understand and respond to his or her needs.

Pre-K to Kindergarten

Children at this level may:

• see death as reversible, not final, and may expect the dead person to return
• see death was accidental or incidental, not as something that happens to everyone
• believe that his or her actions were responsible for the death, and may connect unrelated events (Grandma died because I wouldn't eat my vegetables.)
• think of death as living in another place (What do dead people eat? Do they watch TV
• engage in wish fulfillment (If I wish hard enough, Uncle Joe will come back.)

Children of this age may react by:

• showing anxiety about the possibility of their own death and the death of family members
• ask when the dead person will return
• responding intermittently to grief with brief strong reaction and then returning to normal activity, such as play, as a way of reducing stress
• being confused or upset by the disruption in normal family routine and the grief of close family members and others
• having normal fears heightened (such as fear of dark, of new places, of going to sleep), and perhaps regressing to thumb-sucking or bed-wetting
• crying easily or becoming angry about things that don't usually cause tears or anger

Grades One to Three

Children at this level may:

• begin to understand that death is final and irreversible, but may see death as happening only to some people, not to everyone
• personify death as someone or something (the bogeyman, a ghost) that sneaks up on people and takes them away
• fear that death is contagious, something you catch like a cold
• See themselves as responsible (I told Tommy that I wished he were dead, and two weeks later he died.)
• be confused by words (He's gone on a long journey may be interpreted by a child to mean that the dead person has gone on a business trip or a vacation.)