[EDIT: I realized I left out part of the story, so have added it in red.]
John is slowly developing the concept of death. We're not trying to teach this purposefully, but it comes up gradually. Until now, he has been exposed to the idea only because of seeing "a dead bug" or "a dead squirrel." John has asked for months, "What is dead?" I always answered, "Death is when the soul separates from the body." That answer satisfied him ("Oh, okay!") and he didn't ask further. Only a few days ago did John ask me, "What is a soul?" Then I realized I wasn't prepared and I stumbled through a lame answer like, "A soul is something God gives you and that is inside of you. Everyone has a soul." And that satisfied him, buying me time to go look up definitions of soul and distill them down to a three-year-old's level (which I still have to do--"Baltimore Catechism," here I come!).
I could tell for a long time that he thought something was always alive or always had been dead: that dead bug had always been a dead bug. I didn't bother trying to explain otherwise.
A key moment in his learning came with a story from Grandmom about how she had once seen a bird fly into a window and fall to the ground dead. Since then John has repeated that story to me many times. I think he was working it out in his brain: the bird was flying (alive) and then fell down (was dead).
In the last couple of days, he has been trying out the word "dying" and misapplying it. For example, this morning Mary knocked over her cup of water and it fell on the ground, spilling everyone. John was adamant that the cup was "dying." Then he began talking about dead bugs, at which point he said his more profound statement yet on death:
"Sometimes bugs die and sometimes people die."
All I did was reply, "Yes, sometimes bugs die and sometimes people die." He asked no further questions, so that's where we left it. I find it so interesting to watch the development of this concept!
Emma's been working out the concept of death for some time now as well. It's not something we specifically pushed, but we certainly aren't sheltering her from it either. She was about two years old when she accidentally squished a lady bug and asked me to fix it, so that's when we first had to explain it to her. Plus, we watch a lot of Disney movies where death tends to be a prevalent theme. And I took her to her first funeral/memorial service just after Thanksgiving for a cousin of ours.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what impact on their learning this concept my habit (inherited from my mother) of telling the kids that everything dangerous will make them die has on them, hee hee.
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