Children fear death more than parents realize they do

Evidence

Although mothers typically said that their children were more afraid of snakes and poor grades than getting sick or dying, the children themselves said that they were more afraid of illness and death than serpents and bad report cards. It turns out that children are much more troubled about death, and at a much earlier age, than most of us realize. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 137

Categorization

• QUESTION: What does parental blindness to children’s death fears do to how those fears get managed or dismissed?

Related

• Children’s specific fears coalesce into fear of their own nonexistence (similarity 0.84)
• Knowing how death awareness drives defenses enables more self-determined choices (similarity 0.83)
• No account of human behavior is complete without the awareness of death (similarity 0.82)
• People unaware of their death fears are nonetheless governed by layered psychological defenses (similarity 0.82)
• Death awareness emerges around age three with self-consciousness (similarity 0.81)
• Children first fear death, and only later learn to use culture against that fear (similarity 0.81)
• Fear of death ultimately reduces to thwarted biological survival instinct. (similarity 0.80)
• Without proximal defenses people would be perpetually panicking about death (similarity 0.80)
• People are generally oblivious to death yet it shapes their experience (similarity 0.80)
• Personifying death as villains makes it psychologically manageable for children (similarity 0.79)
• Death reminders increase people’s desire to have children (similarity 0.79)
• Distal defenses minimize the occasions that proximal defenses must handle (similarity 0.78)
• Belief in saviors extends childhood experience of parental protection (similarity 0.78)
• Suicidal people often genuinely believe they will survive their own death (similarity 0.78)