Explaining death to children.

Explaining death to children.

ABSTRACT This essay deals with the necessity of explaining death to children, and offers guidelines as to how parents can do this. It points out that ignoring the child's need to confront the issue of death can only be harmful, depriving him of the opportunity to share his grief. The author suggests that parents be honest with their children about death, be receptive to the child's feelings and...

Explaining sudden unexplained death.

Explaining to Others Prompts Children to Favor Inductively Rich Properties

Three experiments test the hypothesis that engaging in explanation prompts children to favor inductively rich properties when generalizing to novel cases. In Experiment 1, preschoolers prompted to explain during a causal learning task were more likely to override a tendency to generalize according to perceptual similarity and instead extend an internal feature to an object that shared a causal ...

How to talk to children about death.

Death is often a very difficult subject for parents to discuss with their children. It is natural for parents to want to protect their children from the pain and sadness that is associated with the topic of death. Many parents don't want to bring up such an unhappy subject with their children unless they absolutely have to. Unfortunately, a time will come when children must face the loss of a l...

Explaining prompts children to privilege inductively rich properties.

Four experiments with preschool-aged children test the hypothesis that engaging in explanation promotes inductive reasoning on the basis of shared causal properties as opposed to salient (but superficial) perceptual properties. In Experiments 1a and 1b, 3- to 5-year-old children prompted to explain during a causal learning task were more likely to override a tendency to generalize according to ...