In this monograph we (1) provide an account of young children’s
socialization with respect to death and (2) develop a conception of
children’s understanding of death that encompasses affective and
cognitive dimensions. Conducted in a small city in the Midwest, the
project involved several component studies employing quantitative
and qualitative methods. Middle-class, European American children
(3-6 years,N = 101) were interviewed about their cognitive/affective
understandings of death; their parents (N = 71) completed
questionnaires about the children’s experiences and their own
beliefs and practices. Other data included ethnographic observations,
interviews, focus groups, and analyses of children’s books. Parents
and teachers shared a dominant folk theory, believing that children
should be shielded from death because they lack the emotional and
cognitive capacity to understand or cope with death. Even the youngest
children knew basic elements of the emotional script for death, a
script that paralleled messages available across socializing contexts.
Similarly, they showed considerable understanding of the subconcepts
of death, providing additional evidence that young children’s cognitive
understanding is more advanced than previously thought, and
contradicting the dominant folk theory held by most parents. Although
children’s default model of death was biological, many children and
parents used coexistence models, mixing scientifi c and religious
elements. A preliminary study of Mexican American families (children:
N = 27, parents: N = 17) cast the foregoing fi ndings in relief, illustrating
a different set of socializing beliefs and practices. Mexican American
children’s understanding of death differed from their European
American counterparts’ in ways that mirrored these differences.
