Actual death is a tough one. I remember how heartbroken DS5 was the first time he lost a fish, and later when he lost his hamster. I intentionally worked on DS5 re: death because of the impending death of his quite elderly grandfather (who years later is thankfully still hanging on). I think more than anything it was getting a bunch of smallish tropical fish that helped him. There's only so much personal attachment one can have to a particular neon tetra in a big school, and when another small death comes in a fairly regular series of them, one begins to accept death as a fact of life. An ant farm might work well for a very sensitive little one, or maybe a pet bacteria colony.
I really think that people are very adaptable, and that goes for gifted kids too. I'm not trying to minimize this problem, but I am positive that with few exceptions, there would be a way to train excessive sensitivity out of just about any young kid, although it would probably take a good deal of sensitivity and knowledge of the child to do it perfectly well.
With media, I have intentionally pushed the boundaries with DS5 because I figure it can't hurt, and might even wind up deepening his potential for emotional understanding to encounter some things early and let them gel in his psyche. I encouraged a love of heroism for its own sake in him, which took easily as he's a typical little boy in some ways. It took considerable effort for him to enjoy stories without happy endings, but now he can enjoy bittersweet endings, or even a movie like "Cloverfield" where nobody survives. Now he enjoys a good story in its own right regardless of the ending (it doesn't hurt for it to be a monster movie
). His current fave movie is "The Edge"-- I think he must've watched it four times in the last week, and he has a bunch of lines memorized. I know that at one point he would've been completely unable to watch that movie.
