Parents, when faced with the sudden concern of explaining a subject that children have a hard time groping, often retract or just altogether ignore the idea of talking to their children about it.
There are many topics that children on different age levels have a hard time understanding: sex, careers, and death.
As a parent, your role is to be there when they present the inevitable questions (other people might not answer their questions the way you want them to be explained).
Death, for instance, presents endless questions to the young mind.
Thoughts like where their pets go after they are buried, why grandfather has to go to heaven or even cartoon or TV show deaths can be issues that should be fully explained by a parent.
Children's concept of death differs as they move up to different developmental phases.
The primary step to explaining the concept of death to them would be to understand what their minds are capable of understanding during certain stages.
As a parent, you would not want to be held responsible for any misconception or misunderstanding about the concept of death.
You should be able to immediately establish what death is, what it can do, and why there is a need to cope.
To be able to do this, you should know your child and how mature he is (even children with similar ages tend to behave differently).
These are just general concepts of what death is to different developmental phases or ages of children: Infants do not have a concept of death.
For them, separation anxiety is the most relative subject to death.
As a parent, you should know how your family deals with death and apply this to taking care of the infant during the mourning phase.
Remember that when you mourn, activities that you normally do are abruptly changed and the infant can feel this.
The best way to appease the child would be to go back to the same routines or activities since any deviation to these would confuse the child.
Toddlers, still, do not have any concept of death.
For example, a parent could tell a toddler that his grandfather had gone to heaven and the child could associate 'heaven' to the cemetery or the grave itself.
The only way that the toddler is able to 'sense death' is when the people around him become melancholic, angry or even scared.
Children under this age level believe that death is not permanent.
Children in pre-school are highly influenced by their parents, teachers or many other adults around them.
To them, 'going to heaven' is now an understandable concept where the person who passed away goes to a place solely for those who died.
Still, pre-schoolers do not think of death as being permanent.
As a parent, the greatest mistake that you could ever make is to tell them that the person just slept.
Doing this confuses them and might develop into severe sleep disorders when they grow up.
Children of school age have a more realistic concept of death.
To them, the parents will be able to explain that death comes to everyone and that it is irreversible.
If your family sticks to a certain belief on life after death, teach it right away.
This would alleviate the child's concerns on what happens after a person dies.
As a parent, you should be there to allay their fears and explain that although death is inevitable, one can live a full life and enjoy all the same.
Young adults are much more matured on their understanding of death.
Just remember that the foundation that you have set would greatly affect how the adolescent would handle death.
That is why it is very important to explain death as early as possible and in a non-traumatic way.
Again, your family's faith could help the adolescent in coping.
These are just the basic guidelines for a parent to explain death to their children.
All in all, the parents serve as pillars of strength no matter how young or how mature their children are.
The very strength that parents convey would radiate to their children and the children, in turn, would be able to understand death as their parents had taught them.