How to talk about death and why are we afraid of it? Adriana and Oleg for iGlanc.

"Grandma went to heaven."☁️

How many times have you used 'heaven' when your child asked you where grandma disappeared to?

We think we're making it easier for the child, that they're still too young to understand the complexities of death. And mainly, so they don't fear that death will strike someone else.😱

But we don't think about the fact that around the age of ten, a child will inevitably become aware of death on their own; we're programmed that way. By planting false ideas in their head, we're only making it harder for them to understand death.

What's the right and wrong way to do it? We asked our colleague about her own experiences:

🐶 When the family dog died, her parents were silent about it for three days. When she started asking about him, they said he had simply left.

💔 She remembers very well the moment she realized death existed: she must have been around nine, she was in her children's room, getting ready to sleep. And suddenly it occurred to her that her parents would die one day, just like it happens in the action movies on TV that her parents fall asleep to in the evenings. She spent the rest of the night crying. She never confided in her parents about it.

❤️‍🫹 A few years later, however, she experienced the death of her beloved guinea pig the way it should be. She took care of him when he was sick and fed him with a syringe when he could no longer eat. After his last breath, she and her dad held a small ceremony. She buried him in his favorite little house. 

Children, even the smallest ones, are smarter than we think.👶 If we can't talk about death ourselves, we're just building a barrier – and children will keep the questions that bother them to themselves, until death becomes just a concept that they completely suppress. 💨

🙌 To give children a healthy relationship with death, we need to start with ourselves. Oleg and Adriana talk about how to talk about death with children and how to accept it ourselves in a new article. 🙌