1/15/2024 0 Comments Tooth fairy pediatricsAnd while this research is important and necessary, it isn't particularly helpful if you are sitting across from a child who is looking to you for answers, and you are torn between using adult-focused language or blurring the truth behind analogies, such as comparing death to being asleep, cancer to being like a bad cold, or telling a grieving child that their loved one died because "God needed another angel." Numerous researchers have explored death and dying from a child's perspective: Myra Bluebond-Langner, PhD, worked with children with leukemia Maria Nagy, PhD, and Gerald Koocher, PhD, MA, studied how children grow to understand death, and others have attempted to map a child's death comprehension onto social-emotional and cognitive developmental stages. It has five letters - and when it comes to attempting to shelter our children from these harsh realities, are we preserving innocence or ignorance? But death is not a four-letter word, to be whispered in hushed tones. We use euphemisms and dysphemisms: people "pass away" after a "long illness" or "kick the bucket." We use softening and distancing language to compartmentalize death and reduce its universality and inevitability. In many cultures we are relearning how to talk to adults in a post-modern medically advanced world. And that's not surprising - it's not easy to know the right way to talk to kids about death. Often, when we are asked to work with grieving or terminally ill children, these patients come hand in hand with caretakers who have struggled to adequately explain what has or is going to happen.
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