My daughter was two and a half when I was first diagnosed with blood cancer. I still remember the immediate instinct I had, as a parent, to shield her from the news for as long as I could. A small child couldn’t possibly be equipped to handle something so difficult, could they?
It wasn’t so long after that when, on a car journey back from the park, she asked me what happens when we die. It came completely out of the blue, much earlier than I had anticipated. “Shit,” I thought, rapidly emptying my mind of the names of every Paw Patrol character in preparation to go somewhere deeper. There was no time for rehearsing flowery euphemisms; instead I found myself stumbling down a path that was surprisingly honest. Cue the tears and the massive meltdown.
Except – there were no tears or massive meltdown. Instead, there was curiosity, openness and lots of questions. My instincts had been wrong. Children can handle difficult things without getting upset, as long as they hear them in a safe and secure context.
According to Child Bereavement UK, 127 children lose a parent in the UK every day. By the age of 16, nearly all of us have experienced bereavement. And yet we are not being equipped with the tools to deal with it. In 2019, CBUK found that 90% of teachers reported that they lacked the necessary training, despite 86% acknowledging the need to address death in school. It’s something charities such as Marie Curie are hoping to change – by campaigning for lessons about grief to be a requirement within the national curriculum.
Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Portsmouth invited children to share their own experiences of grieving and say how they might be better supported in the classroom. They concluded that there was an “urgent need” for improved training and resources to help students who had experienced the loss of someone close to them. Teachers can’t stand in for trained grief counsellors, of course, but with an average of two children in every class affected – and NHS services beyond stretched – they can provide an environment in which a child feels comfortable exploring their feelings.
Parents, too, can learn from the research about how to speak about bereavement. For example, a child might be praised for “being brave” without an awareness of the pressure that puts on them. The Portsmouth study also showed how some children were confused by the expectation that they should feel sad, which fails to take account of the rollercoaster of different emotions grief triggers, or the way feelings might come and go at unexpected times. They concluded that if educators were armed with a better understanding of the dynamics of grief, and more helpful language – for example, “It’s OK to feel however you feel” – children would benefit.
The actor Greg Wise has spent the last decade or so reinventing himself as a bit of a death and grieving expert. In 2018 he published Not That Kind of Love, a book he wrote with his sister documenting her dying months, during which he cared for her. When I spoke to him earlier this year he told me: “Kids are really open to talking about death. It’s only us who go, ‘Morbid! No, stop!’” He gave a good example of the mismatch between what we teach and reality: the fact that only 11% of people who receive CPR will survive. How strange, that we’re happy to train children in how to save a life, yet squeamish about mentioning the most likely outcome.
In truth, then, it’s not children who are scared of talking about death, but adults. The process of dying used to be dealt with in a much more hands-on way by family, friends and the community. These days, for many of us, it’s been farmed out and shrouded in taboo. It’s something Karl Ove Knausgård reflects on at the beginning of his six-volume autobiography, My Struggle: “The teacher who has a heart attack in the school playground does not necessarily have to be driven away immediately; no damage is done by leaving him where he is until the caretaker has time to attend to him, even though that might not be until some time in the late afternoon or evening.”
Provocative, of course, but it points at a deeper truth: that we can’t hide from death, not really. Not when a pandemic arrives out of nowhere (16,100 children in the UK experienced the loss of a parent from Covid‑19). Or a news story involving mass death stays in the headlines.
In 2022, when I spoke to the psychologist and parenting expert Dr Becky Kennedy, I asked her for advice on my own hard-to-discuss issue. By that point I had already told my daughter I had a “problem with my blood” to explain the frequent hospital trips and patches on my arms. But I hadn’t mentioned the word cancer. Tell her, she advised – instead of beating around the bush, give her the long complex name (polycythemia vera), tell her what treatment you’re on (at the time, blood thinners and venesections), reassure her that she can’t catch it from you (so, think about what might worry you if you were the child) and reassure her every step of the way.
“When we don’t give our kids the whole story they make up a story,” she said. “Why is Daddy in hospital again? It never works out well. Whereas if you give concrete information then a kid can make sense of a situation and not have to generalise in a way that’s inaccurate.”
I’m relieved to have taken her advice; that she first heard this from me, and not out of the blue from another child in the playground. Often, it’s not about what children know, but how they come to know it.
Further reading
Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr Becky Kennedy (Thorsons, £14.99)
Not That Kind of Love by Clare Wise and Greg Wise (Quercus, £9.99)
The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Philippa Perry (Penguin Life, £10.99)
