The Problem of Children’s Understanding of Death

The article reviews British-American tradition of 60 years of research of children’s understanding of death. The problem of age stages in formation of scientific notion of death (S. Antony, M. Nagy, A. Gessell) and the factors of its development in ontogenesis (А. Mauer, M. McIntire, I. Orbach, G. Koocher, S. Shonfield, S. Smilansky, V. Slaughter, E. White). The rupture of the ideas of consistent developmental stages in this process is proved. The recent shift from such methods as play observations and open questions to more standardized methods, that provide comparable results, is described. The article gives generalized results of studying “mature” concept of death as a complex of the following sub-notions: “irreversibility” (impossibility of revival), “end of functioning” (impossibility of physical and mental activity), “universality” (totality, inevitability and abruptness of death) and “causality”(abstract and realistic understanding of reasons of death). The problem of development of understanding of personal mortality is outlined. Several approaches to it are characterized though none of them has satisfactory grounds at the moment.

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