What to Do When a Pet Dies

As with all learning, the child’s curiosity about, awareness and understanding of death grows bit by bit, one piece built on the last, like scaffolding. (But does anyone really ever understand life’s one great inevitability, death?) And there are so many component parts that make up the concept of death and give it a context—the life cycle, life spans, aging, terminal illness, and what happens after death. That’s a whole lot for a child to learn. (And it is all covered in my book.)

Death is not something from which children should be sheltered. It begins as soon as the child is able to notice that dead leaves are falling off the trees. Learning about this reality of life from the people she loves and trusts puts her squarely on track for open and honest communication as she grows and brings her heavy duty questions to you.

In reality, somewhere around the age of four, most children start to wonder about death, weave it into their dramatic play, lace their vocabularies with words like dead, die, kill, shoot, all in an attempt to wrap their arms around this difficult topic. Good for them; it’s part of the growing and learning process.

It is hard for anyone to deal with the death of a person, someone known. Thankfully, it is less frequent that a young child is exposed to a person who is dying. More likely, it is the death of a pet that is the child’s first brush with the concept of death. How is a parent to deal with that?

Helping children to learn through the death of a pet is one of the many stepping stones to learning to deal with their sad feelings and to their healthy emotional development. Below are some suggestions for helping a child to deal with a pet’s death.

When the child, 7 years and younger, sees that his pet is dead:

1. Do not avoid it. As sad as it is, and as hard as it is to allow your child to experience sadness, your child will grow from the experience. Sadness is one of life’s flavors.
2. Do not sugar coat the reality. Less is more. Give simple, clear information. “Buddy Dog died. He is not alive anymore. None of the parts of his body are working. He can’t walk or move or see or hear or lick or bark or pee or poop. He is all done living.”
3. Answer all of his questions simply, honestly, and age appropriately.
4. If your child asks what you are going to do with him, depending upon your plan, I suggest saying, “I am taking Buddy’s all-done body to the vet. The vet has a special place where he takes pets’ bodies when they are all done living, when they have died.”
5. Cremation need not be part of the death story for a young child. The death itself is difficult enough without adding a whole new, scary part.