Helping Children Deal With Death

I read a lot of online articles and extracts from psychological papers on how to best help children to deal with death of a loved one.

The one point that came up a lot was that children are very susceptible to imaginative concepts surrounding death. They can believe that, like in movies or superhero comics, people can die and come back to life and that death is not a constant state of being. Because of this it is very important to be careful the kinds of messages we give children about what death is.

A popular way to explain someone dying to children is to tell them that the person who died has gone to sleep and won't wake up. This has been proven to be potentially damaging because the child could believe that the person who has died may some day wake up or the child may become afraid of going to sleep themselves in case they don't ever wake up again.

Children also display a whole range of emotional reactions to death of someone close to them and a very common reaction is anger. This is why I have chosen to show this in my narrative, in the beginning the boy in the story is angry at his sister for dying and he is angry at the people around him as he feels like they aren't feeling sad about her death anymore.
I want to show his transition from being angry and sad to feeling more positive and remembering the good memories he shared with his sister.

By showing this transition in my narrative I hope to possibly influence and help those children who read it and have suffered a loss. By showing the journey that my protagonist makes in the story I hope that they may identify with the way he feels at the beginning and realise that they too can feel positive like the protagonist does in the end.