Children differ in the their understanding of living and dead. They do not grasp the concept of being dead the same way adults do, which requires abstract thinking. Children view death as a departure in which someone leaves but they may return. They do not understand that death is irreversable and that it's part of a life cycle. To them death is also assimilated with sleep from where one can awake.
Psychoanalytics comment that preschoolers lack a biological understanding of death, meaning that young children do not see death as inevitable or irreversible. Piaget's concept of death confirms that children do not have a good understanding of death and life until about the age of 10 in which they are better able to understand what makes something alife.
Researchers that follow Piaget's tradition suggest that changes in children's understanding of death forms from transitions from preoperational to concrete operational and from formal operational stages of cognitive development.
In the preoperational stage children beleive that death is reversible but not until the concrete operational stage do they grasp the concept that death is irreversible. In the concrete operational stage they do not understand that death is part of our life cycle and that all living things must die at some point in time. The final stage, the formal operational stage allows abstract thinking and it is in this stage that we are able to grasp the whole concept of living vs dead.
Living vs Nonliving : Children do understand that animals and humans are both living things but they have a hard time grasping the concet that plants are also living things. Later in school they learn that what makes something alive is being able to reproduce and grow. School gives them the opportunity to care for animals and plants and there they learn what it takes for something to grow and live. In class we have talked about the essentialim theory, I find this theory very intersting. I think that it is amazing how from an early age we are able to know what is living and what is not and how we have an ability to classify things in groups without having much knowledge even though they may not always look alike.
We acquire our knowledge of non living and living things through learning in our environment as well from our deep understanding that we acquire even when we are little.
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I would agree that very young children, preschool age and under, have a difficult time understanding the concept of death. But I disagree with the Piagetian assumption that death is an abstract that children are incapable of grasping prior to the formal operational stage. I believe that this is another instance where Piaget overlooks the importance of a child’s experiences.
I have seven children, five of whom are adopted. I have had children enter my home at all stages of development. From my own observations, I recognize how valuable a child’s experience can be in understanding the concept of death and its permanency.
My biological children were raised with a menagerie of pets, from dogs and cats to bunnies and lizards. My son was six when our dog died. He immediately asked questions about whether the dog was coming back. We assured him that the dog was gone and that we would never see him again. I never saw any indication that he believed this pet would be returning. In fact, when our next pet died, he very patiently explained to his five-year old sister that the bunny was gone forever.
On the other hand, I have had a twelve-year old in my home that seemed to believe that death was similar to the dying that occurs in a video game, where the character has simply disappeared and exists somewhere waiting to come back when the game is reset as opposed to an enduring state of extinction. From Piaget’s perspective, this twelve-year old should have reached a formal operational stage and should be able to grasp the concepts of death.
Agreeably this may be an extreme case, but it makes the point that many factors can influence a child’s ability to draw conclusions about difficult concepts, such as death. I think that when a child witnesses death they begin to grasp the concepts. It would be interesting to see the differences in children who live in rural farm communities and those that live in inner-cities at pre-operational and concrete operational stages and if and how they vary in their perceptions of life and death. I reject Piaget’s notion, which seems to suggest that children reach a certain age and suddenly have an epiphany about the nature of life and death.
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