Aged from 4 up to 6 years children ask a question: ""Mom, and you will die?"" As a rule, for adults it sounds suddenly. But it is important at this moment correctly not to become puzzled and answer that the child adequately endured the first existential crisis.
Why the child asks about death?
The child who did not reach teenage age asks parents about death because it for the first time faced understanding that all will die. Usually it occurs aged from 4 up to 6 years. Any event can be a reason for this understanding: a disease of the grandmother, the death of the relative, the seen dead bird on the street, someone's conversation about death on the street, in kindergarten.
When the child asks this question, he already knows that death is, and he is frightened by the uncertainty connected with this fact. It asks questions whether parents will die and whether he will die, not to receive the direct answer, and not to discompose parents. Its purpose is to find at adults the lost sense of security and confidence in tomorrow in spite of the fact that all are mortal.
How to answer the child questions of death?
First, it is necessary to admit the fact that all die. It is not necessary to be frightened such questions and to deceive the child. He already knows that he will die, but does not know how you treat it. The fear and refusal on this subject you do not let the child of understanding speak that to do to it with death fact, you broadcast it alarm of death. In this case the first existential crisis will not be lived adequately and will be reflected in the next age crises of the child.
Secondly, it is necessary to offer the child consecutive outlook concerning death.
For example, if the Christianity is close to you, then you can tell: ""Yes, all will die. But only our bodies are mortal. Soul is immortal. And, having left the terrestrial body, it goes to heaven to God, is happy there and looks at us from above."" If you the atheist, then your answer can sound so: ""Yes, all will die. But people are alive while the memory of them is alive. Here, look, the grandfather died, but there are I, his daughter, and there are you. We remember him and we love. Therefore it with us. Or yesterday we read the book: the person who wrote it already died. But there were his words in which he continues to live. We read them and we remember him.""
The task of parents is to build in logically knowledge of death the child's life, his ideas of the world. How it will be made, does not play a role. The main thing to let the child know that:
- a) you it is aware that there is death;
- b) that you treat it calmly how, on your understanding, the world is arranged.
To the child there will be enough your answer. Perhaps, he will ask 1-2 specifying questions, but they will not make for you a problem if you decided on the outlook.
In case of your successful answer to questions of death the first existential crisis in life of the child will end. It will build in all other cases of collision with death that outlook which you offered it. It will proceed up to teenage age. At teenage age the questions of death rise absolutely from other foreshortening, and the teenager will look for answers to them consciously and, most likely, independently.