Death, Squirrels, and Teachable Moments
Last week, while on an evening walk with my boys, we passed by a dead squirrel in the middle of the road. My boys didn’t notice it and at first, I didn’t point it out. When we got home, they found a squished ant on the driveway that garnered my boys’ sympathy and some admonishment was handed out to whomever wasn’t looking where they were going and killed said ant. Without much hesitation I said, “there’s actually a dead squirrel up the road that we passed.” The boys then asked to walk back up to see it. We journeyed back up the road and from the sidewalk peered over to examine the dead squirrel. “How did that happen?” “Who did that?” “Why didn’t they move their car out of the way?” The questions flowed, and I stood there and answered them to the best of my ability. After a couple of minutes, they were satisfied with the experience, and we made our way back home to get ready for bed and tell Dad what we had seen.
Some of you may read about this exchange and be horrified that I would go out of my way to show my kids death. Some of you may be intimidated by that type of exchange but curious about this approach. Regardless, I am very aware that the norm in our society is to avoid talk of death with our kids. It’s an uncomfortable topic because it feels unknown and uncontrolled while also being one of the most universal human (and animal) experiences. It is inescapable, yet we do our darnedest to avoid it at all cost. Bringing it up to our kids can feel like opening up a can of anxiety worms that will burrow into our children’s brains, making them terrified of death for the foreseeable future. Right?
I have an alternative for you. It’s one that I have studied as a therapist and also that I have lived out with my own kids. From that anecdotal evidence, I can say that neither of my kids is terrified of death nor do they think about it all the time, but they also aren’t afraid to talk about it and don’t view it as a taboo subject. To be fair, I didn’t have the option to avoid the death talk with them because both of my parents have died. I don’t want to live a life where I pretend that there wasn’t supposed to be grandparents on my side of the family, so we had to reckon with the conversation that “Papa Jim” and “Mimi,” are no longer alive. Let me lay out for you what I know about talking to kids about death both from my research and my personal experience. My hope is that this can feel like a normalized conversation in your house without feeling like you are going to have to talk about it everyday against your will.
Talking about death as a part of life makes it less scary. In our house, we use the language that in general, people (and animals) die from being old and/or really sick. As my sons have gotten older, we have had more nuanced conversations about this, but I can say things like, “usually, death is caused from being very old or getting very sick from certain diseases.”
Things feel more scary when they are vague. In the moment, it can feel easier to brush over the truth of hard topics like death, but what that actually does is create ambiguity. We leave room for misunderstanding and misgivings when we are not straightforward. When we use language like, “going to sleep” instead of dying, it seems more palatable, but to a kid, it can lead to them feeling terrified that they can go to sleep and not wake up. If we say someone just “went away,” they can feel confused about people or animals leaving and never coming back as a common occurrence. Instead, using plain language, and being as direct as possible (this varies by age, use your discretion for the amount of detail you give), gives kids a clear picture of what happened so they aren’t left filling in the picture with their own worries or extrapolations.
Talking to our kids about tough subjects like this and walking them through the hard feelings is a great life skill that they can come back to. It’s okay for your child to feel sad that a person or animal died. It’s okay for them to wish they were still alive. We as adults could use some work on being okay with these emotions too! We can help our children experience these emotions without being overwhelmed by them by acknowledging the feeling, leaving room for it (sitting in the feeling), and then letting the feeling pass. This will also create a world where you child feels comfortable coming to you with their difficult emotions as they grow. There isn’t a life without grief, why not give your child opportunities to see it as a sign of great love and not something to be pushed down or away.
Whether or not you choose to point out the next dead animal you see on the road, I hope this helps to dispel some of the worries that you might have about having the subject in your household at all. I hope you are spared the heartache of explaining the death of a loved one for as long as possible, but the more comfortable we can all get with talking about it before then, the better off our kids will be when they have to experience loss in their own life.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject and how you’ve handled death in your households! Please share your thoughts in the comments.