Death awareness emerges around age three with self-consciousness

Evidence

By around age three, the grim handmaiden of self-consciousness—death awareness—begins to make her appearance. Rocks seem to last forever, but living things are impermanent and can disappear in death. Children may encounter a maggot-ridden squirrel on a path. They may see Grandma covered with a sheet and being carted out of the house. A first goldfish or the beloved dog dies. Maybe Mom and Dad bury Fido, with all the appropriate funeral rites, in the backyard. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 124

Categorization

• CANDY: “Rocks seem to last forever, but living things are impermanent” is a compact, striking nugget about how children first intuit death.
• XREF: connects to: The cerebral self constitutes mortality internally without achieving self-knowledge — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 1038

Related

• Children fear death more than parents realize they do (similarity 0.81)
• Knowing how death awareness drives defenses enables more self-determined choices (similarity 0.81)
• People are generally oblivious to death yet it shapes their experience (similarity 0.81)