Understanding of the Death Concept by Children

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Introduction

Coming to terms with one’s mortality is a struggling process, and psychologists are interested in this conceptual quandary’s early progression. A full comprehension requires an understanding of death’s four defining properties: universality, irreversibility, causality, and cessation of bodily processes. Researchers are especially interested in whether these four components’ development follows an overall cognitive development or is dependent on age alone. Thus, this analysis generates the topic’s focal inquiries regarding the approximate age of concept acquisition. To answer these questions, literature that ranges over thirty years on children’s development of the death concept is explored.

The Four Cognitive Components of Death Examined

Most authors place the emergence of an early understanding of death at around the three-year level. Children this young can partially understand some aspects of death, although their lower cognitive functioning level is reflected in highly concrete or egocentric sorts of responses (Koocher, 2018). Kane (2019) found that the child’s death concept becomes articulate as more components are acquired and develop from absence to incomplete presence to complete presence. According to Gelman and Nguyen (2018, p. 495), “A coherent concept of death entails an understanding of four key concepts: inevitability, universality, causality, and finality.” Each study examined at least two of these critical concepts, and all of them have been routinely recognized as the necessary building blocks for a child’s complete construal of death.

There is a substantial discrepancy between each researcher’s findings for each component’s age of acquisition. Lazar and Turney-Purta (2018) stress that children’s full understanding of death concept development requires looking at each subconcept separately. They argue that studying the development of the concept of death as a whole is inappropriate. The tendency to do so has led to incongruent findings among researchers over the years (Lazar and Turney-Purta, 2018). Each concept is outlined below in a mutually exclusive fashion for clarity.

Universality

The concept of universality entails the idea that death is universal and inevitable and that there are no exceptions. Nevertheless, young children will believe that certain actions can be taken to avoid it. This is before full comprehension of death’s universality component (Harris, 2018). Generally, children understand that other people will die before they accept it, and they predict their death to be in the far future when they are old. As a result, kids cannot grasp the possibility that their deaths can occur at any time.

Universality is a component that every researcher studied, often asking the question, “Does everybody die?”. Unlike some of the more complex components, the determined age of universality acquisition is unanimous between researchers. This indicates that for at least this specific aspect of death, age alone may be sufficient in explaining the variance of understanding. Childers and Wimmer (2016), Koocher (2018), White, Elsom, and Prawat (1978), Lazar and Turney-Purta (2018), and Gelman and Nguyen (2018) all conclude that the age of acquisition for universality is between ages six and seven, where significant differences are found in comparison to younger children.

Irreversibility

The death component of irreversibility involves the child’s ability to conceptualize that death is permanent and the dead never return to life (Lazar and Turney-Purta, 2018; Poling and Hupp, 2008). Young children answer affirmatively about whether the dead things can come back to life and how they do it. They view death as temporary and reversible and insist that the dead can return to life through medical intervention, drinking water, or the exercise of prayer (Corr, 2007). Many young children also believe that death can be undone. They see it as a peaceful sleep or a trip from which one can return.

Irreversibility develops more spontaneously in children than in universality across the world. It is challenging to verify the age of acquisition based on the studies’ ambiguous results. In contrast to universality findings, it does not appear that irreversibility develops systematically by age maturity (Childers and Wimmer, 2016; White, Elsom, and Prawat, 1978). Childers and Wimmer (2016) and White, Elsom, and Prawat (1978) estimate that not until age ten do children master the concept of irreversibility. Koocher (2018) and Lazar and Turney-Purta (2018) also state that this age is between six and seven. Kane (2019) and Gelman and Nguyen (2018) have results supporting that children as young as four years of age can comprehend this concept. This has also been proved by other empirical research by Harvard and Yale scholars.

Causality

Children must conceptualize the objective causes of death to master causality. White, Elsom, and Prawat (1978) found that some kids use immanent justice notions to explain death. When reading children a story about a mean older woman’s death, twenty-two percent of the subjects attributed the cause of her death to her unattractive behavior (White, Elsom, and Prawat, 1978). In general, young children tend to give more external causes of death, such as guns or drowning, and fail to understand the internal biological causes, for example, disease or old age. Many responses use Piagetian transmission errors when asked how something can die, answering causes. Sternlicht (1980) believes that this is the first aspect of death to appear developmentally. He states that mentally disabled preoperational children have quite concrete and specific ideas of how death occurs (Longbottom and Slaughter, 2018). Kane (2019) and Lazar and Turney-Purta (2018) believe that six and seven-year-olds have mature ideas about causality, including internal and external notions. Koocher (2018) finds the age of acquisition to be ten, and Gelman and Nguyen (2018) show that most four-year-olds can explain how people die.

Cessation of bodily processes (finality)

The concept of cessation is the understanding that all biological, sensational, emotional, and cognitive functions cease at death (Lazar and Turney-Purta, 2018). Some researchers consider cessation to be a more complicated component to master at a young age, and often children only achieve a partial understanding of this concept (Von Drasek, 2016). In particular, kids first believe that the dead have only specific capabilities of living things but not all (Speece and Brent, 1984). Kane (2019) studied cessation extensively and suggests that children realize certain functions and cease death before others. For example, she found that children were more likely to attribute continued cognitive functioning, such as dreaming, to the dead than to noncognitive functioning.

Many authors have researched to answer the question of what happens after an individual dies. Koocher (2018) found responses to the question “what will happen when you die?” were mainly concrete or stereotyped accounts of what would happen. For example, children described detailed accounts of their funerals, descriptions of “rotting away in the grave,” and what it might be like in heaven (Koocher, 2018, p. 374). These responses support that young children can conceptualize death’s morbid reality. They also often state matter-of-fact details about death that many adults find scary to discuss. Only three researchers have critically investigated cessation, which is not enough to reach a general conclusion. Kane (2019) and Lazar and Turney-Purta (2018) both find the age of acquisition to be between six and seven, while White, Elsom, and Prawat (1978) do not credit children with this concept until age ten.

The Continuous or Discontinuous Development of the Death Concept

Researchers are interested in how these concepts fit into a developmental sequence applied to Piaget’s cognitive development stages purported. Since age alone seems faulty in determining how a child comes to understand death, Piaget’s framework provides a fundamentally more controlled and narrower model to apply data (Stambrook and Parker, 1987). The debate over continuity and discontinuity is ongoing within the field of developmental psychology, and Piaget has had a profound and perhaps overrated impact as a stage theorist. However, it is always interesting and illuminating to extrapolate these perspectives and test if they hold up as broad and general theories (Malcom, 2011). This section examines the relationship of the death concept with Piagetian cognitive stages, the four components’ developmental hierarchy, and the influence of individual experience and animal and plant death on concept formation.

The Relationship of Piagetian Cognitive Stages of Development and the Death Concept

The relationship between age and concept acquisition was demonstrated early on by Childers and Wimmer (2016). They conducted a study that solely looked at age differences. They concluded that the awareness of universality, but not irreversibility, was indeed a function of age. It is clear that the death concept matures with age and that substantial changes occur between the ages of five and seven. However, the extent to which this development parallels Piaget’s cognitive stages is uncertain.

Piaget’s cognitive stages include the sensorimotor, preoccupation, concrete operational, and formal operational. The authors of the four studies, Koocher (2018), White, Elsom, and Prawat (1978), Kane (2019), and Sternlicht (1980), were strong proponents of the understanding that cognitive development and not age alone determines children’s concept of death. Lee, Kim, Choi, and Koo (2014), who examined forty children’s death-themed picture books in East Asia and Western Europe, also join the cohort of these scientists. These researchers divided their samples by cognitive stage level by administering conservation tests instead of age alone. Koocher (2018) was the first to recognize the poor organization and methodological inadequacies. Childers and Wimmer (2016) focus on the death concept’s emotional development. Koocher’s (2018) study remedied these design flaws. Instead, it relied heavily on a Piagetian theoretical framework. Koocher (2018, p. 376) found that “age alone doesn’t appear to be a sufficient basis on which to classify or group responses.” This study yielded data that explains both universality and irreversibility as dependent on cognitive functioning levels. It is noted how the “adherences to magical thinking and egocentricity described by Piaget (1960) influence children’s perceptions of death” (Koocher, 2018, p. 377). White, Elsom, and Prawat (1978) study the changes that occur when children transition from the preoperational to the concrete operational stage. They were interested in Piaget’s views on the moral development evident in game playing for concrete operational children. White, Elsom, and Prawat (1978, p. 307) reasoned that “comparably, it might be hypothesized that children at the concrete operational stage of development will understand that death must come to all people.” Understanding death as universal is thought to be related to a higher cognitive functioning level and not merely age. Clement (2013) and White, Elsom, and Prawat (1978) confirmed their hypothesis that universality was related to cognitive and moral development. Kane’s (2019) statistical analysis found that 53% of the variance of concept development was explained by age. She did not conduct conservation tasks and instead took for granted Piaget’s estimated age for entering each stage as common knowledge.

In evaluating her data, she found a development trend that mirrored Piaget’s preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages. Stage one of death concept development was characterized by egocentric and magical thinking. Stage two meant incorporating logical thought and the ability to hold concepts concurrently. Children could think of death in the abstract at stage three and understand the internal causes. Kane (2019) noted that children move through these stages from structure to function to abstraction, which is also the order for children to develop their classification systems. Sternlicht (1980) modeled his study after Koocher (2018) but used only retarded children as subjects. He determined that every subject was preoperational due to their failure of conservation tasks. He concluded that their responses revealed that they did not have concepts of death’s irreversibility or concepts of when they would die at this low level of cognitive functioning. Gutiérrez et al. (2014) attributed this to children’s inability to use reciprocal action; a Piagetian principle deemed necessary to incorporate others’ experiences with one’s own. The subjects ranged in age from ten to nineteen. Still, their preoperational level of cognitive functioning limited them all, as a large percentage of their responses fell under the “egocentric” category.

Emotional training is as essential as cognitive training. If the death happens to someone the child loves, there is an opportunity to discuss and validate feelings and introduce a nuanced emotional vocabulary. By processing grief with you, your child can learn the four great lessons of emotions: Emotions are okay to have (they do not need to be fixed, stopped, or changed), they are transient (you can point out how the feelings come and go, how they change even as they are happening), they have names, and they are embodied (you can point out the places in the body, stomach, heart, and throat where emotion can be felt) (Wiseman, 2013). If the deceased is not emotionally close to your child (for example, a dead sparrow), you can use the experience to teach reverence, respect, and gravitas. Children often take naturally to rituals surrounding death. Emotional training is also an opportunity to train you in patience. Validate that your child wishes things were different, even if it feels like a bit of a loop.

Life is a state of becoming, and death is a part of this process of becoming. It is vital to have open communication with your child on the issue of death (Corr, 2004). This is a compound subject, especially when our child or someone is close to us whom we love very much. To see a child grieve is painful to watch yet, it is part of life. This first point will allow you the opportunity to discuss death before the death of a close family member or friend occurs. And like many other subjects, how the parents react will be important in teaching your child (Gutiérrez et al., 2014). If the parent reacts to death with healthy grief, understanding it is the natural progression of life will help your child understand and accept this situation healthily and appropriately. Moreover, Corr (2004b; 2009) and Drasek (2016) recommend reading useful literature containing the presentations of children overcoming death-associated situations, including the loss of pets. Know that when you introduce the concept of death to a child, you are essentially also introducing the concept of being alive (Evans, 2014). Death is what provides us with the frame of reference for Life. Anyone with exposure to children will know that they are incredibly inquisitive during specific developmental periods. These rapid information processing forms come in stages, with each being different from the previous, but each introduces a large amount of change to him and his psyche (Gutiérrez et al., 2014). You have to ask yourself how this concept will affect him or her, how the person’s loss will affect him or her, and whether he can process it healthily. Death should be understood by a living thing anyway because it’s wired into their brains. Every living organism’s primary instinct is survival, which is to keep away from death.

The Subcomponents’ Sequential Hierarchy of Development

Some of the researchers were interested in developing components and whether some were the more basic prerequisites to understanding more sophisticated ones. Most of the research indicates that children’s universality is widely understood, while the other components’ results are too nebulous to analyze with certainty. Gelman and Nguyen (2018) do not see a precise developmental sequence, and they reiterate: “Research suggests that the death components develop at different rates and the development of one component is not necessarily contingent upon another” (p. 495). In the next paragraphs, Kane’s (2019) efforts and Lazar and Turney-Purta’s (2018) studies that incorporated a separate investigation of the hierarchical progression will be considered. Kane (2019) divides death concept formation into three stages, in line with Piagetian cognitive stages. She argues, “one stage grows out of and subsumes the one before it in a slowly evolving developmental process” (p. 150). There was development within each stage, strongly corresponding to preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational progression. The order she suggests finds universality, irreversibility, causality, and cessation to develop together by age six (Poling and Hupp, 2016f). Understanding the more complicated aspects of cessation, for example, cognitive functioning does not fully come about until age eight. To better understand the order of development, Lazar and Turney-Purta (2018) used statistical analysis of their data. They found that many paths for the development sequence are possible for a child to take. The concepts of universality and irreversibility were developed first independently of one another, and a child either comprehends causality or cessation (Osvath, 2020). This does not hold for the development of children’s concept of animal death, for which a child first understands cessation before any of the others. The study outcome’s actual development is sporadic for sequences offered to have convincing goodness of fit.

The Influence of Individual Experiences on Concept Acquisition

Few researchers consider the effects of children’s individual experiences with death on their understanding. After dividing up her sample based on experience level, determined by a parent questionnaire, Kane’s (2019) results show that when examining this variable of children’s individual death experiences, kids experience accelerated concept development only in those six-year-old or below. Childers and Wimmer (2016) had children draw or write what death meant to them to feel for the experiences children associate with their death concept. There appeared a wide variety of experiences with death, “from squashing bugs to the death of a parent” (Childers and Wimmer, 2016, pp. 1300-1301). However, Childers and Wimmer (2016) concluded that experience has no significant relationship with higher levels of concept achievements. Regardless of their limited direct experience with death, it appears that children are integrating ideas and experiences and are developing an understanding of related subconcepts.

Towards a Biological Understanding: The Case of Animals and Plants

Children’s biology theory may not be advanced enough to include animals and humans on the same plane where death is involved. Lazar and Turney-Purta (2018) found that children understand all of the subconcepts except for cessation better related to human and not animal death. Perhaps cessation is more comfortable to comprehend when referred to animals because children have more actual visual experiences with an animal’s death. Johnson (2004) focused their research on four and six-year-old abilities in applying the components of death to plant types. They first interviewed kids about the death components of flowers, weeds, and trees. In a second experiment, the researchers had children point to drawings of plants and artifacts to determine if they could tell the differences between animate and inanimate objects. In a final test, they directly compared the children’s death concepts of plants with animals (Delisle and Woods McNamee, 2007). This study’s unique element is the researcher’s comparison of all four and six-year-old responses to real adult answers attained from undergraduate psychology students. Every other research had previously assumed that a “mature” understanding of death was impeccable in the biological definition. Many adults did not meet all of the criteria for fully comprehending each component of death as it applies to plants and animals.

Methods of Research: How to Account for Variances and Contradictions

The inconsistencies found among researchers for the age of acquisition have made it challenging to reach overarching conclusions on the topic. Much of the problem is due at least in part to the different ways researchers have structured and assessed their data. The more current authors tend to prelude their studies with accusations and criticism of the prior research. In a review of the literature, Speece and Brent (1984) state that for at least some children, “dead” and “alive” may not even be viewed as distinct states. Therefore, concluding that young children think the dead are functional or can come back to life may credit some of them with more differential concepts of alive and dead than they possess. Some studies are also arbitrary in how they measure and accredit understanding, and many are unstructured in design.

How the Components Are Measured

Considerable variability in results may be due in part to differences in assessing a child’s understanding of each component. To determine concept mastery during an interview with a child, some only required a yes/no response to such questions as “does everybody die?” White, Elsom, and Prawat (1978) asked children to justify their answers to count as correct. As expected, some kids could not provide answers for “why,” except for false ones that they made up on the spot under pressure. Even though it was likely that they did not believe their reasoning, White, Elsom, and Prawat (2019) assumed that they did in their conclusions. White, Elsom, and Prawat’s (1978) study found the age of acquisition for the components of irreversibility and cessation to be ten years, the oldest age suggested by any researchers.

While task difficulty may skew results, another problem is the researcher’s differing and arbitrary requirements in determining the acquisition age. White, Elsom, and Prawat (1978) define the age of acquisition for universality to be age seven because 67% of seven-year-olds correctly answered the questions. Koocher (2018) says that universality is understood by age six, as evidenced by 91% of his six-year-olds demonstrating proficiency in the concept. According to Kane’s (2019) subjects, 64% of five-year-olds understand universality. The question of where to draw the line needs to be reassessed.

Design Flaws

Cross-Sectional vs. Longitudinal

The application of the longitudinal approach has been adopted by a few researchers. Lazar and Turney-Purta (2018) were the only researchers to use a short-term longitudinal approach instead of a cross-sectional one. Their introduction makes the point, that “previous studies used cross-sectional samples, which did not allow for the analysis [of a pattern of development]” (Lazar and Turney-Purta, 2018, p. 1323). This study sample included 99 six and seven-year-olds tested twice over seven months. Significantly, Lazar and Turney-Purta (2018) demonstrated that changes occur within only seven months, with many children showing mastery of most of the subconcepts at time two. While every subconcept showed upward movement from the time one to time two, the most considerable changes happened to the understanding of universality, cessation, and causality (Leavy et al., 2020). The longitudinal design enabled the components to be studied as independent units of a related theme. Their development could be tracked and more precisely related to a general developmental sequence if one exists.

Open-Ended and Leading Questions

One flaw with previous research is that abstract, open-ended questions were used to assess the child’s understanding of death. Moreover, children understand much more than they can express verbally (Lazar and Turney-Purta, 2018). The tasks may be too difficult, and too specific, and some interviews include biased leading questions. The early studies tended to use unstructured questionnaires and interviews that varied vastly from one another. Piaget’s methods have continually been criticized for using open-ended questions and challenging tasks. By designing new methods, contemporary psychologists garner younger and younger children to be capable of more advanced cognitive activity. The same trend appears to hold in the death concept. The more recent and complex studies, which control more variables and focus the interview questions in a more structured manner, have yielded younger children more credit for their understanding of components.

Unrepresentative Populations

It is important to note that all of the studies unanimously use small samples that lack diversity. Lazar and Turney-Purta (2018) explain that many studies use more highly selective samples than in other research areas due to the topic’s sensitivity. The majority of parents were reluctant to allow their children to study probing questions about death. Sternlicht’s (1980) research included only fourteen mentally disabled children, and many of the responses were not included in the analysis because judges could not reach a consensus on classifying answers. As a result, his data is undermined in the field (Malafantis, 2013). Most of the other studies, even those that looked at large age ranges, did not have samples that exceeded one hundred. Usually, there were less than twenty subjects to represent one age group. Additionally, the data represent white, urban, middle-class children of average or above intelligence.

Over-Reliance on Piagetian Stages

Many researchers in this area have attempted to integrate the concept of death into a Piagetian framework without considering other aspects (Lazar and Turney-Purta, 2018). Many studies are inherently limited in scope by accepting Piaget’s stages as unified structures. The researchers who attempted to fit their results into neat stages may have been too preoccupied with this goal to consider other options and may have ignored other compelling data that was offered. Researchers fail to explain why there seems to be preoperational, or “nonconserved,” who could correctly respond to questions about death before they reached the supposed concrete operational stage.

Conclusion

These data suggest that most children of all ages achieve at least some understanding of each component. All of the components are comprehended simultaneously – between ages five and seven. This is around the transition from the preoperational to the concrete operational stage of cognitive development. Thus, both age and Piagetian stages seem to predict a child’s level of understanding about death. It is difficult to determine a hierarchy for children’s development under such circumstances. It can be argued from the data that universality and irreversibility appear first. It also may be necessary before one can understand causality or cessation. It may accelerate concept formation in younger children. Age six is also when children are shown to have a fully biological conception of death. They can appreciate death’s role in all biological entities, including animals and plants. It has been emphasized that the results from these studies are vastly ambiguous and contradictory. This may be due to unforeseen errors in methodology, and future research should note past shortcomings to put forth more reliable data.

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