Talking About Pet Loss With Your Child

When I first graduated from college, I worked as a nanny for a psychologist. One day she shared that their family goldfish had died. We schemed for nearly 20 minutes about what we would say to her daughter, since this was the child’s first experience with death and we thought it could be an excellent teaching moment.

We pulled her away from her playing to explain that the fish had died. We told her we could help her have a funeral if she wanted, and that we could find a box to bury the fish so she could say her goodbyes. We went into detail about what a casket was and what a funeral was. After our monologue, we stopped and asked if she had any questions. After a slight pause, she asked, “Can’t we just flush it?”

Keeping Things Simple

This is a lesson I use to this day: keep things simple, and meet your audience where they are. Sometimes, as parents, we try to overcompensate for our own fears and make situations more challenging than they need to be. Here are some tips for talking to your children about pet loss.

• Tell the child about the death, then pause and ask what they think it means before moving on with further explanations. This helps guide you as to what questions they may have, or whether that is enough information for the moment. Children process grief differently, so they may only need a small amount of information at first and may come back several times with more questions as they process it.
• Remember to express your own grief, and reassure your child that many different feelings are OK. Allow children to express their feelings. If a child is too young to express themselves verbally, giving them crayons and paper or modeling clay can be a great way to let them express their grief.
• Avoid terms or clichés such as:
  • “Fluffy went to sleep,” which could instigate fears of going to bed and not waking up.
  • “God has taken” the pet, which could create conflict in a child who becomes angry at a higher power for the pet being sick, dying, or being “taken” from them.
• Be honest. Keeping a death from a child can cause increased anxiety. Children are intuitive and can sense when something is wrong; when a death isn’t explained, they make up their own explanation, which is often much worse than the reality.
• Children are capable of understanding, in their own way, that life must end for all living things. Support their grief by acknowledging their pain. The death of a pet can be an opportunity for a child to learn that adult caretakers can be relied upon to extend comfort and reassurance through honest communication.

Developmental Understandings of Death

Two- and Three-Year-Olds

• Often consider death as sleeping
• Tell them the pet has died and will not return
• Reassure children that the pet’s failure to return is unrelated to anything the child may have said or done (magical thinking)
• A child this age will readily accept another pet in place of a loved one

Four-, Five-, and Six-Year-Olds

• Have some understanding of death but also a hope for continued living (a pet may “continue” to eat, play, and breathe although deceased)
• May feel that any anger they had toward the pet makes them responsible for its death (“I hated feeding him every day”)
• May fear that death is contagious and begin to fear their own death or worry about the safety of their parents
• May show changes in bladder/bowels, eating, and sleeping
• Several brief discussions are more productive than one or two prolonged ones

Seven-, Eight-, and Nine-Year-Olds

• Understand that death is real and irreversible
• Have less concern that they or their parents will die as a result of the pet’s death, though it may still be a worry
• May ask about death and its implications (“Will we be able to get another pet?”)
• Expressions of grief may include somatic concerns, learning challenges, aggression, or antisocial behavior, and may appear weeks or months after the loss

Adolescents

• React much like adults
• May experience denial, which can take the form of little emotional display — they may be experiencing grief without outward signs

Additional Resources

• Petloss.com — a gentle, compassionate website for pet lovers grieving the death or illness of a pet, with a weekly Pet Loss Candle Ceremony.
• Often your veterinarian has, or knows of, a local pet loss group.

Children’s pet loss books:

• Badger’s Parting Gifts by Susan Varley
• Lifetimes by Bryan Mellonie & Robert Ingpen
• The Tenth Good Thing About Barney by Judith Viorst