043: How to talk with children about death

The topic of today’s episode comes courtesy of my good friend Sarah, who fortunately hasn’t yet had any reason to use this knowledge, but asked me to do an episode on how to help children cope with illness, death, and grief, so she can be ready in case she ever needs it. Dr. Atle Dyregrov joins us from Bergen, Norway. He graduated as a psychologist in 1980 and worked for five years in the Pediatrics department at Haukeland University Hostpital, helping families whose children had died. He also co-founded the Center for Crisis Psychology and served as its general manager for 25 years; he is now its academic director. He has worked particularly extensively with children who have experienced loss and trauma, as well as at the sites of major accidents and disasters both in Norway and abroad, and has written numerous books, book chapters, and research articles on children’s response to death and crises. It turns out that this ended up being a very timely episode for me indeed: you’ll hear in the show that my mum died when I was young.  Not even a week after I did this interview, my newly three-year-old daughter was playing with Legos in our living room when she asked – completely out of the blue – “Do you have a mama?”  Having done this interview I was well-prepared for a short but straightforward conversation, and was able to shift what would likely have been a very uncomfortable situation for me into something where I felt much more confident in explaining how people’s bodies stop working when they die. Subscribers to my newsletter will recall that we spent last week in Missouri visiting the very same Sarah who requested the episode, and I had given her a summary of the content and told her about my daughter’s question.  A couple of days later Sarah and my daughter found a dead bug on a playground and Sarah said “I think it’s dead,” and my daughter responded “Did it’s body stop working?”.  Sarah was taken aback…and amused…and was able to answer the question without losing her cool. Listen to this episode – we’re all gonna need it at some point!   Dr. Atle Dyregrov's Book Grief in children: A handbook for adults - Affiliate link   References Abdelnoor, A., & Hollins, S. (2004). The effect of childhood bereavement on secondary school performance. Educational Psychology in Practice 20(1), 43-54. Adams-Greenly, M., & & Moynihan, R.T. (1983). Helping the children of fatally ill parents. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 53(2), 219-229. Ayers, T.S., Wolchik, S.A., Sandler, I.N., Twohey, J.L., Weyer, J.L, Padgett-Jones, D., Weiss, L., Cole, E., & Kriege, G. (2013-2014). The family bereavement program: Description of a theory-based prevention program for parentally-bereaved children and adolescents. Omega 68(4), 293-314. Baker, J.E., Sedney, M.A., & Gross, E. (1992). Psychological tasks for bereaved children.  American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 62(1), 105-116. Berg. L., Rostila, M., & Hjern, A. (2016). Parental death during childhood and depression in young adults – a national cohort study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 57(9), 1092-1098. Berg, L., Rostila, M., Saarela, J., & Hjern, A. (2014). Parental death during childhood and subsequent school performance. Pediatrics 133, 682-689. Bugge, K.E., Darbyshire, P., Rokholt, E.G., Haugstvedt, K.T.S., & Helseth, S. (2014). Young children’s grief: Parents’ understanding and coping. Death Studies 38, 36-43. Corr, C.A., & Balk, D.E. (2010). Children’s encounters with death, bereavement, and coping. New York, NY: Springer. Dyregrov, A. (2008). Grief in children: A handbook for adults (2nd Ed.). London, U.K.: Jessica Kingsley. Engarhos, P. (2012). The young child’s understanding of death: Early conversations and experiences with parents and caregivers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. McGill University. Montreal, Canada. Kristensen, P., Dyregrov, A., Dyregrov, K., & Heir, T. (2016). Media exposure and prolonged grief: A study of bereaved parents and siblings after the 2011 Utoya Island terror attack. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 8(6), 661-667. Renaud, S-J., Engarhos, P., Schleifer, M., & Talwar, V. (2015). Children’s earliest experiences with death: Circumstances, conversations, explanations, and parental satisfaction. Infant and Child Development 24, 157-174. Yang, S., & Park, S. (2017). A sociocultural approach to children’s perceptions of death and loss. OMEGA. [Epublication ahead of print.] DOI: 10.1177/0030222817693138   Read Full Transcript   Transcript Jen:   [00:37] Good morning and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. This episode comes to us courtesy of my good friend Sarah, who fortunately hasn’t yet had any reason to use this knowledge, but she asked me to do an episode on how to help children cope with illness, death, and grief, so she can be ready in case she ever needs it. So my guest today is Dr. Atle Dyregrov, who joins us today from Bergen, Norway, and he’s actually the first knighted interviewee on the show, so we’re going to refer to him as Sir Dyregrov. He’s also a professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. He graduated as a psychologist in 1980 and worked for five years in the pediatrics department at Haukeland University Hospital, helping families whose children had died. He also co-founded the Center for Crisis Psychology and served as General Manager for 25 years and he’s now it’s Academic Director. Jen:   [01:29] He’s worked particularly extensively with children who have experienced loss and trauma as well as at the sites of major accidents and disasters, both in Norway and abroad, and has written numerous books, book chapters and research articles on children’s response to death and crises. Welcome Dr. Dyregrov. Dr. Dyregrov:   [01:45] Thank you. Jen:   [01:46] Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to have you here. Now. Before we get started on this topic, I just want to have a little word with my listeners because some of the episodes that I do on the show are episodes that I do for them and some of them are closer to my heart and this is one that’s a little closer to my heart as well. It’s not really a secret, but it hasn’t come up yet in the course of doing the show that my own mom died when I was 10. In a way that was both sudden and unexpected and it was so long ago now that it’s not really a difficult thing for me to talk about anymore, but I kind of wanted to make sure that people are aware of it because it does impact the way that I talk about death and also the way that I think about it. Jen:  [02:20] I’ve lived with it for so long now that I sort of think I’ve earned the right to have a bit of a dark sense of humor. I also use very frank language like death and dead rather than passing or lost, and whenever someone uses the word lost, when they actually mean someone died. I always think of a quote from that fabulous Oscar Wilde play The Importance of Being Earnest, where Jack Worthington says, “I have lost both of my parents,” and Lady Bracknell responds: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthington, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.” So our goal today is to try and understand what children understand about death and how they experience grief and to give you some real tools you can use when you need to talk with them about it. So let’s get started. All right, Dr. Dyregrov. I thought we could begin on Canada. Easier end of the questions and work our way towards the harder ones. So death is everywhere around us, you know, it happens to all of us and our media is absolutely saturated with it, but we have such a hard time talking about it and particularly talking about it with children. So I’m wondering if you can tell us your thoughts on why this is and is it really because we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and should we be afraid of that? Dr. Dyregrov:   [03:31] I think that’s part of the reason, but I also think that we are afraid of it because it has to do with our own vulnerability; the thought that maybe we will die away from our children to be left alone. That’s a hard thing for parents to think about and talk about. So it is a difficult topic for everyone. And I think it’s that some of the reasons for