Teaching Children How to Cope with Challenges Through Literature

Death, violence, illness and loss are all parts of life. As much as we may hope to protect children from these harsh realities, we can’t remove them from the environment or explain them away. You can’t protect a child from feeling sadness at the loss of a grandparent, or fear after witnessing a violent event. Pretending these things don’t happen can confuse a child, turning her thoughts inward. This can cause psychological pain and may even cause long-term emotional damage. As caregivers, it is our job to educate children about the stark and difficult realities of life gently, in a way they can access and understand.

Children’s literature provides a healthy venue for exploring these trying topics. During story time, children are focused on the characters, not on their own fears or experiences. Learning about death through the lens of a fictional character can provide a buffer, a safe distance for children to learn. Books create an environment in which children can grapple with what loss is and what it means, removed from real-life experience. As the child gets older, he will understand the stories you read him more thoroughly and deeply. Children grasp what they can comprehend, slowly internalizing the fictionalized message as they grow. Providing a range of scenarios with likable characters helps children to feel empathy without feeling directly affected by the topic at hand.

Children’s literature is a broad genre and, like with any literature, quality is not guaranteed. Read books before you buy them to make sure they address difficult issues thoroughly and well. The best children’s books are ambiguous, with multiple interpretations, prompting the child to ask questions and wonder about the implications of the story. The best stories embrace complexity, teaching children that the world is never just black and white. Many children grow up with a false sense of dichotomy—assuming everything is either good or bad, right or wrong. This makes understanding complicated emotional challenges like illness or death difficult, since there is no easy answer. Teaching children to feel comfortable with ambiguity teaches them to face their fears and work at understanding them, rather than shutting down and running the other direction.

One of the difficulties faced by many parents and caregivers is their own confusion, fear and uncertainty about illness, loss or death. For religious parents, a children’s Bible provides plenty of comforting answers to what happens after death. However, for an atheist parent, the lack of a comforting ideology to explain away death makes helping a child cope uniquely difficult. Fortunately, there are many different types of children’s books from all religious and non-religious perspectives that discuss and explore illness, violence, loss, death and dying. Begin by finding books that are in line with your ideology or, if you are concerned with raising a critical-thinker, choose books from many different ideologies and challenge your child to recognize that different people have different beliefs. Eventually, your child will find her own way, choosing the beliefs or explanations that resonate, developing her own ideology. If your goal is raising a well-adjusted child, quality children’s literature should be in your arsenal, in abundance.