Teaching five-year-olds about grief isn’t morbid – it’s necessary

After a summer of record-breaking heat, our autumnal cues are off-kilter. Crisper, cooler mornings still feel a way off, while leaves are making their transitory descent far too early. It’s a back to school season like no other.

“It’s such a shame they all died, isn’t it?”

On this occasion, my child was lamenting the loss of Vegesaurs, mistaking the animated root vegetable characters for the long-extinct dinosaurs that once roamed the Earth. It’s a poignant observation for a primary-aged child, growing up in a time of mass extinction, global climate change and widening social division. Conversations about death in our home are commonplace; as a family, we’ve been graced by grief more than once.  

Read more:

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• ‘It’s OK to laugh about death’: And Mrs director Daniel Reisinger’s guide to facing grief with a smile
• ‘Tragedy is a cruel teacher’: Harlan Coben on how death of his parents made him a better writer

We won’t be the only family holding grief at the school gate this year. With an estimated one in 29 school-aged children bereaved of a close family member, grief will be present in school life. Bereavement is only one form of loss. Children also grieve beloved pets, family separations, changes in health, and the strain of financial insecurity. Some of these are forms of systemic grief, shaped by the economic and social worlds around them. I’ve seen it surface in pencil sketches stuffed into book bags, in the quiet, gate-side handovers between guardians and teachers, in playground games and on the school run. These are responsive lessons in loss, grounded in everyday experience.

In my professional life as a thanatologist (someone who studies death and dying from multiple perspectives), I spend my days researching and working with grief. Despite this, the most enduring lessons I’ve learned have come from children; not just in how they grieve, but in how they live alongside loss and change. Their responses are intuitive, embodied and often unfiltered. It’s these observations that have shaped my belief that education must meet children where they are. When it comes to grief education, children as young as five are ready to learn.

From the age of five, most children are developmentally able to grasp complex emotions and scenarios related to grief. Children construct narratives from the fragments available to them, imagining reasons for their loss, assuming they did something wrong, or are in some way the cause of grief. Research also tells us that children bereaved in early childhood re-experience grief at every developmental stage, with broadened emotional capacities and an understanding of the finality of death. Children and young people need ongoing opportunities to process grief, and to carry these lessons into adulthood.

That’s why I’ve long supported calls for grief education in schools. Its inclusion in the latest Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) guidance is a welcome step. For the first time, grief is explicitly named in the curriculum, requiring schools to educate pupils on responses to change and loss, grief as a natural response to bereavement, and the ways in which people grieve differently.

By walking alongside those growing with grief, I’ve come to understand loss, change and bereavement as a kaleidoscopic human experience. Children have taught me that grief is not a singular emotion, but a constellation of emotional, behavioural, social and familial responses. They grieve in motion, through play, imagination and storytelling; building worlds where the fantastical makes space for their realities. They show us that grief and joy must coexist, that play is not a distraction from grief, but an active integration of it. I’ve learned to embrace tactile and sensory processing, to make room for comfort and mementoes. Children have taught me to lean on the things that help, and to let those things go without ceremony when they no longer serve.

These lessons on grief do not negate the need to teach children and young people about loss, change and bereavement. They underscore the call: children deserve age-appropriate relational, iterative and culturally competent grief education that meets them where they are.

This isn’t a simple ask. Training and confidence gaps persist among educators. Schools are under-resourced, and families are overstretched. Department for Education guidance alone will not integrate grief education in our schools, leaving children to navigate both personal grief and the wider losses created by circumstance and societal change. Our children are observant: they notice when the world around them shifts, when opportunities are lost, or when identities are erased. They will learn about grief, bereavement, loss, and change, whether we support them or not. Teaching grief from the start honours the lessons children are already living; the personal losses, the societal shifts and the changes shaping the world they are growing into.

Rowan Humphries-Massey is the founder of Navigating the Wilderness, a community research practice advocating for grief and systems change.

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