It can be compared to giving a child the pieces of a jigsaw, each piece gradually making up the whole picture. You can give this information over a number of hours, days, weeks or months, so that the picture gradually gets clearer in a way that helps your child to feel comfortable with it. Also think about other factors, such as the possibility of your child finding out what happened from other people or online. The pace between these stages is often led by the child’s age and ability to understand death and how much interest they show in knowing more. If you don’t have answers you can say ‘I don’t know’, or ‘I wish I knew, I have lots of questions too’. Give them time to process it at their own speed, until they ask a further question or you offer a bit more information. This may be something like ‘they died in a car’, or ‘they made themselves stop breathing’.Įach of these pieces of information may be enough for a child in one go. Start with the most important fact that the person has died and add some very simple sentences to explain that the person took their own life, and how. Explore possible reasons why the person decided to kill themselves.Provide a more detailed explanation of how the person died.Say that the person took their own life.Give simple details about how they died.Our experience shows that there are several steps involved in telling a child that someone has died by suicide. How to tell a child someone has died by suicideĮxplaining to a child that the death is a suicide is often a series of steps, each one adding a new level of understanding, building on what the child may already know. It will help them to have a simple story of their own they can retell and use to slowly make sense of what has happened. For younger children the information needs to be simple, maybe only a few sentences. We advise to follow these principles: tell them the truth, as far as you know it, in language they can understand, and in a way that takes into account their understanding of the world around them.Ĭhildren need to process information, so give them a simple initial explanation and build of it later. Finding the right way to talk to very young children about suicide can be daunting. The younger the child is, the harder it is to talk about something as complex as suicide. Are my children too young to talk to them about a suicide? Read more about whether you should tell a child that someone has died by suicide. If everyone has a common understanding that the person made themselves die, then older children don’t have to keep secrets and younger children don’t feel excluded. It’s best to try and give children, even young children, truthful information about a death to avoid confusion and misinformation.Ĭhildren of different ages in your family will need the same basic facts but with different levels of complexity. Should I tell a child that someone has died by suicide?
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