Young children's understanding of death

Abstract

There is a long history of research on children's understanding of death. This article briefly reviews psychoanalytic and Piagetian literature on children's death concepts, then focuses on recent research in developmental psychology that examines children's understanding of death in the context of their developing folk theory of biology. This new research demonstrates that children first conceptualise death as a biological event around age 5 or 6 years, at the same time that they begin to construct a biological model of how the human body functions to maintain “life”. This detailed new account of children's developing biological knowledge has implications for practitioners who may be called on to communicate about death with young children.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on the first draft of this paper.