Okay, so I don't know if this has anything to do with giftedness but I think the approach to dealing with it does.

DS5 is nightly, for last month, crying, stressing, freaking out, and asking questions about death.

We don't know anyone that died; he just had the realization that we are not forever. I've tried to answer questions about God. Part of me worries about when he hears about differing religious views now though, because it will call into question all the things I've told him. And I'm sure that in his reading he will come across words like atheism, or reincarnation that I will have to explain. I'm glad we are not atheist, because at this stage, there is no way I could comfort and calm him down with that one. In his mind, nothing after, would be the worst possible thought.

How do we deal with this? Being honest is hard at this age...I hate scaring him even more. I try to be as honest as possible, but sometimes what I say works him up into a bigger frenzy. And he asks so many questions I don't have answers for. How am I supposed to explain that we know what we know?

So I am hoping, that in light of his intelligence and ability to ask the deep questions, there is a best way to handle this.
Experience and your insights greatly needed.

I know all kids probably go though this stage, but is five early? And should it just pass after a few months - hopefully??

I don't think that five is early. I think that's about the time that I figured out that the sun would eventually become a giant star and either eat the earth or burn the earth to a cinder.

I think that my existential anxiety/depression peaked around 18 or so and lasted through most of my early 20's.

What about telling him that you don't know the answer if you don't know the answer?

And about the questions that *do* have answers, the answers depend entirely on the question being asked, being that a materialist question/answer is quite different from an ontological/metaphysical question answer.

I figured out early on that my parents weren't going to be of any help with any of these questions, particularly with respect to cosmology, so there was no point in asking them and I was on my own.

Phey, am I recalling that this is your child with severe food allergies? Hmmm...

this is a pretty normal thing that all gifted kids seem to go through at earlier-than-comfortable ages... but I have to wonder if this is related to medical stuff and personal landscape.

This is one of those areas where being 2e can lead to some seriously thorny problems.

My DD has never had a time when she DIDN'T know that she could die, and sort of developed a gestalt surrounding mortality that stuns other adults. There was no point in lying to her-- she has nearly died, and the first time she was less than a year old. SO.

We often find that after a major event, she will go back to this negative place and cogitate on it a while.

Platitudes are not the way to handle this in a child who has a chronic and life-threatening condition, as I'm sure that you know.

Honestly, I probably wouldn't use religious reassurances much, either, in that case. I'd focus on the "why" of such concerns, not the "what." We didn't have a choice, because we are not theistic religious adherents, but in retrospect, DD has had no trouble with we believe that "there's nothing past this." We also included what OTHER human traditions believe, for perspective. DD considered this fascinating.

Mostly, we reassured her about the precautions and interventions that we can (and do) take to prevent death. That was really what she was worried about. She wanted a 100% guarantee, which we can't give. So we didn't. But we did give her a more complete picture with our personal lifestyle choices and statistics. Her personal risk of death-- annually-- is something about .1-1.0%. (Yes, this is far far higher than for most people, but it was enough to reassure her.)

She does not necessarily suffer a lot with managing Emotional OE, however. That would change things.

For managing anxiety particularly related to anaphylaxis risks:

a) reassure the child that s/he is NOT solely responsible for life-saving medications and their use.

Sometimes these kids can get the idea that we as their parents and they as little children are the only people who really "get" the danger, and conclude that anytime you aren't in charge of them, they are on their own for basic safety. (While this has grains of truth in it, it's not completely accurate, either-- other adults CAN be trained to administer medications, recognize an emergency, and call for emergency medical aid, right?) You can offer reassurances that the babysitter, teacher, coach, etc. knows about the allergy/condition, knows how to get help, etc.

b) differentiate between the CHILD's responsibilities and those of the ADULTS in the child's life.

This is really hard for HG+ kids with this problem-- because they read so early, you have to make it very clear that food safety/risk management still isn't 100% on them, no matter that it theoretically could be... because (as we their parents know) they don't yet have the life experience and judgment to parse all of the information yet. My daughter CARRIED her own medications from a VERY young age, but she was very definitely not responsible for self-administering it. She never worried about that, but kids who start self-carrying between 5 and 10 yo may get this idea, and translate it into a fear of dying. HG+ kids with celiac, TypeI diabetes, or RA can also have some of these same concerns. But we can help them to understand that they really aren't expected to undertake complete management at these young ages. It's hard, though, because they ARE managing elements of them, and those elements ARE pretty critical, and they are very definitely not chronologically "age-appropriate" when viewed through a developmental lens.


HTH.

I'd ask questions to figure out "why" this is such a concern recently-- that will let you know where to go with it. The fact that it has been going on so long indicates (to me, anyway) that something there needs addressing, not just waiting out.

This is something of a FAQ around here actually - if you're interested, this search in google:

death site:davidsongifted.org/BB

will find you many other threads on the subject. I'll just say I agree with HK, for now.

I definitely tell him when I just don't know. No problems with that. It is the how do I know what I know that is harder.

HK- yes he has severe nut allergies. But I really think it has little to nothing to do with that. We have been careful to say that he will just get really sick if he eats a tiny bit..but that we always have the epi-pens with us, and the chances of death are so small if he has an epi-pen that I don't feel like this is lying to him. We can cope with a reaction if needed. Luckily, by having a super OC parent, we have made it five years and only had the one original, first time trying PB reaction. So, I don't think that is something he is too worried about death because of.

Re: the different religions... (been there!) explain that everyone with a religion believes in a higher power - we just use different words. For example we say God, Jehovah's witness say Jehovah, Islam says Allah, etc etc. You could make a list of cultures and names for God and then show DS. "See? We all believe that there is a higher power - we just have different names, and different ways of worship, but it's the same higher power." It's like different languages: dog, chien, perro, hund, cane, etc etc... it's all the same animal.

Most importantly, don't lie. Yes, people DO die. It's part of life. Make sure your DS knows that it's normal, it happens to everyone eventually, and it probably won't happen for a long, long, long time. It's ok if he's afraid, but he doesn't have to be. Show him you're not afraid.

My kids had fun with the idea of reincarnation. I told them that really, no one knows for sure if it's real or not. I told them that Atheists are not bad people, they just have their own beliefs. My kids are 8 and 10 now, and we've spent a lot of time discussing how it's ok for people to have their own beliefs.

My two are both very spiritual... I remember a carpool ride with a classmate when my DD was about 7... the classmate was a boy (HG) who did not believe in God (he wanted scientific proof). DD was horrified! "How can anyone not believe in God??" This led to discussions about respecting other people's opinions and beliefs.

My DD10 was PLAGUED by fear of death when she was five. It was really, really hard (I was exhausted stressing about it). Not just fear of death, but intense sadness about it as well. My sister had a cat who died when DD10 was 7, and she was traumatized for months (literally). The idea that a beloved could cease to exists was too painful for her. She's always been extremely sensitive that way. She was 9 and saw a dead bird on the school ground and it made her cry all the way home. Nine!! I don't think it ever really goes away.

DS processes differently... he stays happy and bubbly on the surface but underneath he'll think about it... for weeks. Out of the blue, weeks later, he'll start: "What happened to the cat's body? Is he in heaven too? Can he see us right now? Did he know he was going to die? Does anyone know when they're going to die?" etc etc... then DD gets mad: "Stop talking about it!!!" and starts crying again.

The key, I think, is be honest and share info with your DS in small pieces (don't share too much too soon). You might just have to ride it out until he's a bit older... my kids calmed down a lot about it as they've grown. They don't seem to have any atypical fear ("I can't ride a car - I could die") etc. In spite of DD10 extreme fear surrounding it when she was younger, she's full of life with a healthy sense of adventure. DS, meanwhile, is all fun. It does get better

It's possible that his anxiety about death is directly linked to his religious background, because if he's already aware that sometimes bad things happen to good people, and he believes that God is responsible for everything that happens, then that's not the kind of ideological framework that can make a child feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Our household is also not theistic, and the question of death has never seemed to be a big issue for DD8. Just a couple nights ago she asked why everyone dies, but there wasn't any kind of anxiety wrapped around it... just a question. She's growing fascinated with the idea of religion in general, though, and just recently acquired her own bible, which she has decided to read cover-to-cover (good luck with that).

Well, tell him how you know what you know.

Do you mean explaining how you "know" matters of faith? My four year old has many questions about death (he's currently convinced birthday cakes kill since most people he knows that died had many birthdays...). As far as faith, we just explain it as such. No- there is no proof. But when I am quiet and still and listen to my heart, this is what I believe and I take it on faith. I don't ever state is as "knowing" though, but rather "believing." This leaves it possible for others to believe differently without being wrong, my child included.

That is tricky... For instance, we know that we die (science and observation) but do we really know what happens after? Nope.

Can you isolate specifically what it is that scares him? Is it the process of death or the unknown that comes after? On the other hand, if you analyze it too much with him you might just give him more to obsess about and be afraid of. Sometimes less discussion is more.

I've just tried to normalize it with my kids. Because they're older, we can talk about things like species survival ("wow. imagine if everyone who'd ever been born was still alive? there'd be no food left." etc).

Normalize, and model calmness. "It happens to everyone eventually - it must be ok." Or... "I can't prevent it from happening eventually, so I'm not going to stress myself out about it, and I'm going to trust that it will be ok." (I'm referring to healthy acceptance, and not reckless disregard: "It doesn't matter what I do - eventually I'm going to die anyway." You know what I mean.)

I used to be really afraid of it too. Now I'm ok. (LOL I worked with a girl years ago who was looking forward to it - not out of depression, but out of curiosity! "I can't wait to see what it's like!")

Once they can read, though-- they DO pick it up casually and from the media.

YOU may never have said "this could kill you, you know..." but it's possible that he has determined this from sources other than you. It may also not be the best idea long-term to DENY the potentially fatal aspect-- just noting that this can lead to trust issues later when they discover that your early explanations were lies of omission. Just something to consider there.

I know several people who have had this happen with their school-aged kids in the wake of a major news story about a fatality. With HG+ kids, it's a real concern because they are simply nowhere near as oblivious to adult conversations as those adults often seem to think that they are. Teachers, sitters, family friends, etc-- basically anyone that knows that your child has an epipen can do it out of the blue. There isn't any "unhearing" those things for our kids, either. KWIM?

It's amazing the kinds of insensitive things that get said around kids, sometimes. I mean, they aren't oblivious! I've also found that my DD sometimes doesn't tell me for a few weeks about things that bother her. (Thinking about the art class instructor that informed her that she should "see this chiropracter" she knew, for a "cure" for her allegies, for example... this REALLY bothered her because she thought that maybe it was real-- she was four-- and that perhaps we didn't care enough to cure her, or that we didn't KNOW about this cure, and that called into question our competence, her specialists competence, etc. Aughhh.)


If this is (or is ever) an issue that requires addressing, one helpful tip is to offer 'differentiating' characteristics to your child in a way that reassures him/her that s/he is NOT going to become a statistic. "We always carry your epinephrine, even if we don't think that we will be eating anything." "It sounds like this person needed a LOT less of the allergen than you have in the past in order to cause a reaction like that." "This is why we are always careful to ask questions in restaurants." "It sounds as though this person didn't get help from her friends right away when she knew she was in trouble, huh?" I also play the doctor-expert card periodically with particularly nasty issues, like the one with the artsy teacher that thought that woo was the solution...

The bottom line is that focusing on how preventable most of those fatalities are can be helpful to kids with life-threatening medical conditions, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, they have to develop the emotional resilience to manage those realistic concerns that are extraordinary, and to do so with healthy coping. It can be a tall order.

I'll echo others: be careful with your assumption that an atheist world-view must be the worst. My experience also bears out that this is not what troubles even a highly sensitive child. Hanni has been okay for quite a long time with the idea that when we die, our bodies become part of the earth, and our minds just stop existing.

Instead, what upsets her is (for the past year) thoughts of violent death and violence between people, and (more recently) thoughts of her loved ones dying, and her desire that she and I die at the same time.

I almost think this is the most peaceful ending... to just... stop. Like a slowly falling leaf that's landed on the grass.

It's hard to wrap my head around. What would that be like? To just no longer exist. It's interesting, isn't it? Our brains are centres of chemical/electrical activity that can certainly be shut off, but our consciousness too? Unless that's just part of the chemicals and electricity. I don't blame my former co-worker for being curious. I guess we won't know until it happens.

Boy, lots to respond to. I've tried the, I'm afraid too, I don't want to die, but we do and we don't think about it daily approach. Tried the, billions of people on earth, new ones born all the time talk, tried the I don't know, I've never done it approach....

I think his main fears are that it will hurt, and the whole concept, that I am my body, so if my body rots..ahhh. Also just fear of the unknown..what will heaven be like?

I really think it has nothing to do with food allergy fears. He talk about dying at 100..not in relation to what he eats.

I think he might have emotional OE, but not sure..maybe he is just five;). He is intense though!

Explaining faith is hard for me. I'm not strong faith wise; I'm a prove it type.

Maybe he'd like to explore a variety of faith traditions' beliefs in after-life existence?

It seems like my DD was about 4-6 when we explored some of those concepts-- not with a right/wrong approach, just with a "this is what this religious tradition holds to be true," kind of logic.

She found some of them silly, some of them weird, some repellent, and some too strange to really gets one's head completely around.

We let her know that ALL of those are appropriate responses, since this is all belief-based, and that different people can believe really, really different things.

One stressor that can emerge pretty early is with a child that faces the reality that their own inner landscape, faith-wise, is incompatible with family traditions. Some faiths are better about that than others. My own family pretty much espouses the notion that I'm going to burn in a lake of fire, incidentally... and this was a clear outcome in my mind by the time I was about seven. It made me very sad.

HK, we haven't neglected to mention that anaphalaxis could kill him, but we don't talk about that much, focusing instead on, it is extremely likely that if you have epi-pens, you will be fine. Sure he has picked up on things, but I don't see the stress with eating or fear associated with that. I could be wrong, but my parent instinct says, no.

I do worry about digging too deep, because I don't want him to focus too much on it. Right now, all the fear and crying comes at night, when his brain has turned off everything else. But I get just interest questions, without the fear throughout the day.

For him, just ceasing is the worst possible case. But we aren't atheist, so I'm not even going to bring that up. It might be poetic for some, but not us.

At this stage, I'd think exploring more options would only confuse him more????

phey, I think you've already gotten great advice above, and I also think that for the most part this is a phase that will most likely pass. The one thing that I would add is - have you tried gently asking questions to see if something set off this particular phase? My dds have gone through worries like this, but in each case there was something subtle that I didn't realize had happened until I really got them talking outside of their fears. For instance, with my allergic dd, she'd watched a show about anaphylaxis on tv that I had no idea she'd seen. This happened around 6 years old, and she had known prior to that time that her allergies could kill her - she knew it intellectually and factually, but she'd never thought of it in an emotional way and the show (a child had anaphylaxis, didn't die, but went to the ER etc and death was talked about - I think) - seeing it that way triggered fears in an emotional way that she hadn't experienced before. Same dd also had a phase of fears of death when she was thinking about her unknown birthparents (she was adopted), realized that they might die before she ever meets them, and then without me realizing she was thinking through any of this, moved on to worries about her own death. My younger dd worries about death too - more from a fear of God type thing. We are a family of faith, but she processes that faith in a very different way than I do and differently than my values are that I try to pass on to my kids. So even though *I* am not teaching my children to fear death, she's been through a phase where she saw it as a very scary thing based on her interpretation of religion. You can't believe the intellectual entanglements we argued around when she was going through that phase!

I hope your ds is feeling better about things very soon - sending him a hug!

polarbear

It really depends upon personality. My daughter led me into discussions that I would never have deliberately embarked upon with a child so young. I would have sworn, if I'd been asked, that it wasn't a concern for her, or that if it was, that such a conversation would merely confuse/upset her further.

But I was often wrong about that.

I had assumed that because my DH and I are firmly non-theistic in our worldview, that this would (naturally) be how she sees the world, as well. It's not. Just as my mother would have SWORN that her worldview (being "correct") would be all I needed, I imagine. It wasn't, either-- it felt inauthentic and troubling, even when I was quite young.

SO. It truly depends on personality and readiness. If your child is one that likes to be told "the" answer, then exploration is probably not a good idea. However, if your child is a "yeah, but..." questioning type, it is a pretty essential part of reaching an inner consensus, or at least a temporary truce with the inner quest to understand.

My mom and I were really not on the same wavelength there. She thought that children (all of them) needed "the" answer, and that HER worldview would be comforting universally because she was so passionate in her faith, and found it profoundly satisfying/true. I wound up feeling alone because it was as though she was dancing to music that I could not hear. I tried to see it her way, but it really just upset me MORE.

Some kids like certainty, and others are perfectly content with ambiguity. My DD and I are both in the latter camp. Her dad is more in the former, and so was my mom. If my DD were like my mom, then a single heartfelt explanation of MY beliefs, gently and comfortingly given, would have been the best way to handle it. My DD wasn't reassured by that-- at all-- so we went with the inquiry-driven model and a lot of Socratic interactions until she found some things that resonated with her and helped her to feel less anxious about it.

Yes. We had a very tough spell with this last fall with DS6 (still revisiting it periodically) and one thing that really helped him was to hear that this was a big question, that people had been trying to figure it out since the beginning of humanity, and that we didn't have to figure it out all tonight - but we could talk about some of the answers people have found. That seemed to give him the space he needed to relax a bit.