As a parent, many of your responsibilities are often going to feel a little tiring. There are so many things that you are going to have to do to make sure that you are raising your children well, and it is hugely important that you make a point of doing this as well as you can. Of all the range of things that you need to try and prepare your children for, one of the very hardest – possibly the hardest of all – is that of mourning someone’s passing. However, everyone is going to go through this at some point, and many children will have to experience it ultimately with the death of a grandparent. So what can you do to make sure that you are preparing your kids for this part of life?
Normalizing It
One of the most important things that you might want to think about doing is finding a way to try and normalize death. After all, it is a very normal part of life, and everyone is going to have to face it at some time or another in different ways. Because of that, it is wise to make sure that you are moving in the right direction with it, and making it a normal thing with your children, not some scary secret that needs to be ignored. As a culture, we have a lot to answer for here, and we are in many ways much more terrified of death than many other cultures around the world at this moment and in history. We can all help to move against that by normalizing death with our children.
When we do this in conversation with our children, we are helping them to be able to deal with it much more effectively when it does happen – but we are also starting to pave the way for a future society which looks upon death in much better terms, as something that just naturally occurs rather than a dirty secret that we should pretend is not there. For your kids, you will find that this is one of the best ways to empower them to be much more capable of looking death head-on.
Talking About It
Just more generally, you are probably going to want to talk about death with your children a little. You don’t have to get morbid or start talking about it all the time, but you do want to make sure that you are making them aware of it as a reality, and the manner in which you talk about it is going to prove to be very important in how they come to relate to it later on. For instance, if you find that you can talk to them about death in a calm and clear way, then that is going to inform how they think about it, and they will become calmer and clearer around it in their own minds. Clearly, that’s something that you are going to want to make sure of, and it is a hugely valuable thing that you are giving them there.
Using Its Instance As An Example
It might be that you don’t actually have a choice but to teach your children about death very young. For instance, you could find that there is a death close to you while your children are young, and that you are going to need to explain to them what is going on and what it all means. When this happens, you of course might not yourself be in the best position to be able to do that, but as long as you aim to retain a clear and level head you should find that it is easier than you might assume.
Talking to your children at this point is crucial, and you should make sure that you do so clearly. But you should also involve them to a little degree in some of the rituals around death that we have. Whether that is something small like picking out some cremation jewelry from memorials.com or whether it’s more along the lines of just teaching them what happens in the family when a death occurs, you will find that this is going to be very important indeed and will make a huge difference to their overall development.
It is, in many ways, a positive thing when a child experiences something like this very young, as it means that they have to learn a lot about life from a young age. Often, that makes for a strong development in later life, and a kind of strength of character that is only rarely seen. That’s something that you might want to bear in mind if you start to worry about it as something that might change them for the worse somehow.
Not Overdoing It
Of course, in all of this, you should be careful not to make it into a bigger thing than it is. You certainly don’t want to spend all of your time talking to your children about death, as that is going to give it too much of a place in their mind, and that is certainly not the way to go. However, it’s all about balance. If you can find the right balance, the right level of talking about it versus not talking about it, then you will find that you are doing your children a favor in terms of their future development. It’s the kind of thing that you just need to try and work out through trial and error and the use of your own intuition.
In time, you will come to see that your children develop their own understanding of death, and their own ways of coping with it, and that is something that happens naturally for each of us as we get older. It is an important part of life, and not to be ignored, so this is absolutely something that you should make sure you are paying attention to if you want your children to have the best possible start.