Published originally at Patheos.
One of the most common questions I hear about nonreligious parenting from reporters and parents is, “Without heaven, how will you make your kids okay with death?”
Three myths are embedded in those 11 words—misunderstandings that have to be unpacked before we can get a handle on the topic.
Myth #1—that religion cures the fear of death.
Religion pretty obviously does not cure the fear of death. All of the religious people I know fear death and work hard to delay it. They look before crossing the street, watch what they eat, follow doctor’s orders, are terrified by a bad diagnosis, pray for the recovery of seriously ill friends, and weep as hard as the rest of us when someone close to them dies. They’re just as dissatisfied with company policy as I am.
Belief in heaven is not a free pass to contentment. I know some believers who worry themselves sick over whether they’ve satisfied the entrance requirements. One Catholic woman I know lost sleep for weeks after her husband died, convinced that he had gone to hell for missing too many Masses.
Some comfort.
When it comes to comforting children in the face of loss, even mainstream parenting experts often find the invocation of heaven problematic. In Guiding Your Child Through Grief, James and Mary Ann Emswiler caution against such wincers as “God took Mommy because she was so good,” or “God took Daddy because He wanted him to be with Him,” for reasons that should be obvious. “Don’t use God or religion as a pacifier to make grieving children feel better. It probably won’t work,” they write. “Do not explain death as a punishment or a reward from God.” By the time they and most other child development experts are done, the greatest supposed advantage of religion has evaporated.
We’ve now set the bar more reasonably. Our goal as nonreligious parents is not to somehow cure the fear of death, but to keep that natural and unavoidable fear from interfering too much with the healthy experience of life.
Myth #2—that children are less able than adults to think about death.
We flatter ourselves by suggesting we’re in the best position to comfort our kids about death. If anything, the opposite is true. Developmentally, young children have a reduced grasp of the finality of death. As behavioral biologist Melvin Konner writes The Tangled Wing, “From age three to five they consider [death] reversible, resembling a journey or sleep. After six they view it as a fact of life but a very remote one.” Though rates of development vary, Konner places the first real grasp of the finality and universality of death around age 10—including a more concrete awareness that it applies to them as well.
That children tend not to fully “get” death during the early years has its downside—crossing the street would be a lot easier if they did, for example—but it also has an advantage. These are the years during which they can start to engage the idea of death more easily and more dispassionately than they can if their first serious grappling comes later. And such early engagement can help build a foundation of understanding and familiarity to ease and inform later encounters with it.
Myth #3—that we can or should be “okay with death.”
I have no intention of making my kids entirely “okay with death.” Fear of death is among our healthiest and most desirable fears. Natural selection put it there for good reason: Those with a genetic indifference to death would have been more likely to meet it early, resulting in fewer offspring.
The desire to live is also a helpful social regulator. The promise of a glorious afterlife suppressed the natural fear of death and made the attacks of September 11th possible. Standing entirely fearless in the face of death is not something we should wish for our children.
So then what obligations do we have to our children regarding mortality? I’d suggest two: to provide reasonable comfort, and to encourage thoughtful engagement.
Obligation #1—To provide comfort
Even though we can’t cure our kids of the fear of death, much less ourselves, you want to keep that fear from overwhelming them.
Even loss that doesn’t involve death is a difficult issue for kids, especially in their first few years. A toy that rolls under the crib gives rise to a keening wail. A game of peek-a-boo is riveting for infants because the parent vanishes and then returns, and the child squeals with delight. Only after a good deal of experience and development does the child learn that things that go away continue to exist out of sight—and usually return.
So it’s not surprising that the child’s first confrontation with death is such a blow. After that long, hard climb out of her early misconceptions about loss, she suddenly learns that her hamster is gone and not coming back. Little wonder that we create safe and happy places in our imaginations for our loved and lost ones to continue running on the exercise wheel. The tale of Christ’s resurrection is essentially a three-day game of peek-a-boo, and we squeal with delight when he returns.
Here are some expert opinions on how best to comfort a child who has experienced the death of someone close to them:
• Be honest. Don’t pretend that anything less than the worst event of their lives has happened. Validate their pain and grief. Tell the child it is not just “okay” to be sad, it’s good. Her sadness honors the person who died, showing that she loved her very much, and expresses real feelings instead of keeping them locked inside.
• Share emotions. Keeping a stiff upper lip in front of the children is of no help to a grieving child. Let her know that you are grieving too—or better yet, show it.
• Be patient. There’s no healthy or effective way to rush a grief process. The suggestion that “it’s time to move on” should come only from the griever, not from the outside.
• Listen. Invite the child to share what she is feeling if she wants to. If not, respect her silence. Listen without judgment.
• Reassure. You can’t bring back the deceased person, nor should you pretend he or she is somewhere else. But you can and should do everything possible to make the child feel personally safe, loved, and cared for.
• Speak openly. The absence of the person is the single most painful element of the loss. Avoiding the name or discussion of the deceased can often make that sense of absence more painful and more acute. Share memories of the person and use her name or “your mom.” If tears result, remember: the goal is not to avoid sadness, but to help the child work through the intense grief. Let her be the one to tell you if a conversation is too painful.
Ideally the loss of a loved one will not be the first encounter with death. You will have prepared them for years by talking about death in naturalistic and unforced ways, from the dead bird in the backyard to walks in cemeteries.
Obligation #2—To help our kids engage the most profound thing about life
The most profound thing about our existence is that it ends, rivaled only by the fact that it begins. One of my objections to the idea of an afterlife is that it deflects our attention from the deep and honest consideration of mortality by pretending that we aren’t really mortal after all.
Nonreligious parents are in a unique position to help their children begin a lifetime of powerful reflection on death and life, dipping their minds into the deepest and richest streams of thought. It’s not always easy to be mortal, but do we really want to limit our children’s experience of the world to those things that are easiest?
When he said that “to philosophize is to learn how to die,” Montaigne wasn’t the only one to put the contemplation of death at the center of our intellectual universe. As parents, one of the best things we can give a child is a healthy start on honest engagement with the biggest idea they will ever confront. Avoid the subject isn’t even possible–they will encounter it in their lives. And just as with sexuality, alcohol, religion, and drugs, the worst thing we can do is try to keep them ignorant. The longer they are kept from thinking about these things, the more dysfunctionally they will confront them once they finally do. That doesn’t imply taking a “deal-with-it” approach to death. On the contrary: talking openly, honestly, and compassionately about mortality is the best way to protect our children from a painful blindsiding later in life.
I’ve found more consolation and wonder in the Lucretian symmetry argument, and the idea of my atoms returning to the universe, and Dawkins’s moving spotlight, and the astronomical odds against me ever being born than I ever found in the idea of existing forever. We can bring that same gift to our kids by not just letting them toe-dip these ideas, but encouraging a headlong plunge.
[Excerpted from “Death and Life” by Dale McGowan, in Raising Freethinkers]***************************************
This post first appeared on March 26, 2018, at patheos, a site that publishes both religious and nonreligious blogs and commentaries. It is cross-posted on the Good Death Society Blog by permission of the author, Dale McGowan. His website can be found here.
