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Don’t Wait for Tragedy Before You Talk to Your Kids About Death
I never talked to my daughter about death—then her dad (my husband) died. I didn’t know what to do. I consulted websites, books, child psychologists, pediatricians, and pastors, and they all said the same: Have honest, forthcoming, age-appropriate conversations about death, using concrete language. This advice is widely given by both believers and unbelievers, and it’s good advice. But as Christians, we shouldn’t reserve it for times of tragedy.
As much as we try, we can’t keep death from affecting our children. They see dead animals and dead plants. They watch movies and read books in which characters die. They overhear grown-up conversations. They have grieving friends. Our children know that our world is broken. And if we want to teach the whole witness of Scripture and speak precisely about the gospel, we’re going to have to talk about death with the children in our homes and churches.
Talking to kids about death gives them an opportunity to worship God in light of Christ’s sacrifice and to seek comfort in him as they live in our broken world.
Death Is an Important Theme in Scripture
To teach all of Scripture to our kids, we’ll have to deal with death.
We start at Genesis 1, and we don’t get far before death is introduced. While death enters our world with Adam and Eve’s sin, God also promises to send the One who would crush the Serpent’s head. So we keep reading, looking for this Savior. We turn the page to the next story, and it’s about murder. We keep going and we read the first genealogy, where we repeatedly see the refrain “And he died.” Every story and character points us to our need for someone to crush death, atone for our sin, and fix the brokenness.
The genealogy of Genesis 5 may not be included in the preschool curriculum in our churches, but we do tell children the stories of Noah and Daniel and David—and death or the threat of death is there too. If we try to avoid death in Scripture, we’ll have to skip a lot. Death is a thread throughout.
Kids need to see that God’s Word shows us how awful death is and invites us to be sobered by that. When we do, we’re also giving them the opportunity to long for the very things we were created to long for—wholeness, peace, a relationship with our God of life. Throughout Scripture, death is the dark background against which the glory of the gospel shines.
Death Is Central to the Gospel
To faithfully teach the gospel to our kids, we must explain the truth that Jesus died.
Throughout Scripture, death is the dark background against which the glory of the gospel shines.
If we’re to gaze at the resurrection in its full beauty, we must first explain that Jesus died on the cross and was buried in a tomb. We can’t skip past the awful parts of this story, because if our kids don’t have any sense of the weight of death, they may miss the significance of Christ’s willingness to die on our behalf.
We should be careful to talk about Jesus’s death in a way that won’t scare children or heap undue shame and guilt on them. But we unintentionally downplay God’s love when we don’t talk to our kids about the reality and significance of Christ’s death.
In a world full of death, our kids need to understand that we worship a God who both experienced and defeated death. When our kids are scared, afraid, and overwhelmed at the bigness of death, we lift their eyes to the God who is bigger than death itself.
Death Helps Us Hope in God
Talking to our kids about death in light of the gospel and all of Scripture helps our little ones hope in God.
While moms and dads can fix many things for kids, death isn’t one of them. Talking about death points our children away from solely relying on us and highlights God as their ultimate hope. We can embrace a crying child, but we can’t fix the brokenness of death.
In a world full of death, our kids need to understand that we worship a God who both experienced and defeated death.
Only God can make it right. God promised to send a Savior to save us, and he kept that promise. He promises to make all things new, and he’ll keep that promise. As we teach kids about death, we can also teach them to hope in God.
Although we may want to avoid talking about death with our kids, we can’t. Sooner or later, we’ll have to help them navigate a real experience with death. So before death hits close to home, look for opportunities to broach the topic with your kids. When you see a dead animal on the side of the road, take a moment to talk about the sadness of death and the effect of sin on the world. When you’re reading a book together, don’t hurry past the mention of a character’s death, but take a moment to answer your child’s questions. When an elderly neighbor dies, take your kids with you to the funeral, and teach them how to show love and sympathy for the grieving family members.
As hard as it is to talk about death, we can start building a foundation now so that when our kids’ hearts deeply ache from the brokenness of this world and death leaves them with questions that have no earthly answers, they’ll know they can cry out to the God who has conquered death.
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