Chinese preschool children’s understanding of death

ABSTRACT

Children could internalise blame for a death, suffer as much grief as adults, and express as much emotion as adults. Research on young children’s perceptions of death has been conducted primarily in Western cultures. This paper is an exploration of Chinese 5-year-olds’ understanding of death. Data analyses are mainly based on children’s drawings and their description of the drawings. Children’s drawings of issues related to death were analysed using the phenomenographic method to identify content-specific categories. It is shown through this study that Chinese 5-year-olds have an initial understanding of the biological, psychological, and metaphysical concepts of death. Findings of the current study highlight the importance of paying more attention to the impact of cultural practices and religion on children’s understanding of death.

KEYWORDS:

• Understanding of death
• early childhood
• Chinese culture
• religion
• belief in the afterlife

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the draft of this article. I wish to thank the Education University of Hong Kong for providing a research grant for this study; the Hong Kong Bank Foundation for funding the Zippy’s Friends teachers’ training in Hong Kong. I am grateful to children, their parents, head teachers and the dedicated teachers from Hong Kong. I would like to specially thank them for their help and support on my study. Special thanks to Li Ka Yan who assisted with collecting the data, data coding and entry.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Internal Research Grant, the Education University of Hong Kong.