The issues surrounding how children understand and respond to death have profound implications for their healthy development into adulthood. Multiple factors influence their cognitive understanding of death, including chronological age and developmental capacity. How well they will cope constructively with losses in childhood is a complex combination of internal and external forces, with important implications for professionals and parents.
Scholarly commentary on children’s understanding of, and reactions to, death reaches back to the 1930s and 1940s, with the publications of Paul Schilder and David Wechsler, Sylvia Anthony, and Maria Nagy. How and when children develop a mature understanding of the finality of death, how their reactions and responses differ from those of adults, and what methodologies best accommodate them in healthy grieving are topics that have received increasing interest in the research and clinical communities in the past 3 decades.

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