“It’s not all doom and gloom, it’s life”: parental beliefs and parent-child conversations about death and their influence on children’s developing conceptions of death.

Seeley, Carys (2022) “It’s not all doom and gloom, it’s life”: parental beliefs and parent-child conversations about death and their influence on children’s developing conceptions of death. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Four studies are reported that investigated when and how children acquire an understanding of aspects of death, especially its five ‘subcomponents’ of irreversibility, inevitability, universality, cessation, and causality. Building on previous research and providing a unique and novel perspective, child, parent, parent-child factors, and their associations with children’s developing understanding of death were explored. These factors include experiences with bereavement, pet ownership, parental afterlife and religious beliefs, and parent-child conversations. Through interviews with nine mothers, Study 1 took a grounded theory approach to explore how parents’ beliefs about death influence what they discuss with children. In Study 2, 96 children were interviewed, and their parents completed questionnaires, to further investigate how these parental beliefs and other factors predicted children’s concepts. In Study 3, a new storybook task was used to observe naturalistic conversations about death between 19 of the parent-child dyads who participated in Study 2. By comparing data from Studies 2 and 3, Study 4 addressed issues highlighted in the previous three studies, including conceptual change during the period between studies, and how actual conversations compare with those self-reported by parents. Key findings were that such self-reports are often unreliable measures of parent-child conversations because parents tend to underestimate children’s active roles within them; parent and child factors likely influence children’s conceptions, primarily through their impact on parent-child discussions; and children are able to reason spiritually about death from as young as 5 years, as their biological knowledge develops. This latter finding contrasts with that of previous research (e.g., Harris & Giménez, 2005), according to which spiritual reasoning first occurs only after biological knowledge has been acquired. The findings of this thesis have numerous methodological and theoretical implications for research and for adults (e.g., parents, teachers, and clinicians) facing discussions of death with children.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	01 Feb 2023 11:15
Last Modified:	01 Feb 2023 11:15
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/90902
DOI:

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