Our twin girls were two-and-a-half, and we were reading them their storybook Bible. The night’s story was David and Goliath.
“The stone flew and hit Goliath right in the forehead, and he fell down dead.”
Dead? I froze as I was reading. Are they too young to talk about this? Will it scare them to know that people can die? Do they even have the mental capacity to understand what death means? All these questions flashed through my mind in a second. Fortunately, my girls didn’t ask about what “dead” meant that night, and I had the chance to think more deeply about those questions.
Most parents have probably had a moment like this with their kids. Death is not something that our culture likes to think or talk about. Through most of history, people died at home being cared for by family and community and children would encounter death at a young age. Today, however, death is something that medical professionals oversee behind the closed doors of a hospital. We have no idea how to talk about death, and, as a result, many children have only a muddled concept of what death is.
But, as Christians, this should not be true of our children. Understanding life and death is vital to understanding the Christian faith. A child can’t understand the significance of Jesus’s sacrifice without understanding His death and resurrection. We can't explain the wonderous glory of our salvation from death if we sanitize death for our children to try to make it less scary.
My husband and I realized that we couldn’t teach our children about the Bible if they didn’t have a concept of death. So, we began explaining to our girls that God gives us life on earth for a short time and then we all die. When that happens, we will either be with God in glory forever, or be separated from Him forever. We used scripture to paint the wonder of the new heavens and new earth for them. Then we talked about what separation from God means, and how sad it is that there are people who don't know God.
I was surprised how well our girls responded to these conversations. Instead of being fearful of death, they had a framework to understand what happens when someone dies. Many times since then, when we have been reading or watching something where a character dies (it comes up a lot when you dust off the old Disney movies!), my girls have said something like “but it’s only a little bit sad, because they’ll be in heaven with God.” Isn’t that the hope we want our children to have, rather than them being lost and confused by all sorts of euphemisms about death?
“She’s just asleep.”
“He’s looking down on us.”
“She’s an angel now.”
“He’s still with us in spirit.”
These aren’t necessarily bad things to say (except for the ones that do not align with scripture), but for a child who has never had death explained to him, euphemisms can be deeply confusing, bringing pain instead of comfort.
I would encourage parents who have never talked to their children about death to seek out good stories that show how death is a natural part of life. Some day, often sooner than you think, your children will have to grapple with death in the real world, and we, as parents, should do all we can to give them a framework to understand death rightly.
Here are a few book and movie suggestions to get you started. Not all of these are stories that specifically talk about death from a Christian perspective, but they show death and sacrifice in a way that can lead to wonderful conversations.
Do you have more suggestions to add to this list or questions about how to talk to your children about death? I'd love to hear from you!