How to Discuss Death With Your Kids, From Real People to Pets to Fictional Characters

📆 9/15/2019 4:15 PM

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📆 9/15/2019 4:15 PM
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'The first thing to do is to normalize feelings. Everybody's upset. Everybody is really sad.'

How do you talk to children about family members dying?

Although it can be hard to come up with the perfect words when you're put on the spot, Dr. Yardley emphasized the importance of using the correct language."It's also important to be relatively careful about the language that we use," she explained."Don't use phrases like, 'sleeping' or 'gone away,' because kids think gone away means I left the house, not necessarily that a person died.

She continued:"Open the door of the conversation again. How are you feeling? Do you miss Grandma? Modeling our own feelings is really important. So if it's a grandparent that means it's one of the parents' parents. Showing that it's okay to talk about it and say, 'I really miss Grandma today. I'm sad that she's not here. She would have liked this.

"An older kid who can really grasp that their pet is suffering, that this is a planned decision, that it's the best thing for the pet and they want to be there, I think having them there is totally appropriate," she explained."I would always encourage parents to use their gut. Some kids will say, 'I want to be there.' And, as parents, you're like, 'Oh, I just know you can't.

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