We can help children feel needed by asking them to answer doorbells and telephones. In short, we allow children to mingle with family and friends. They are given an opportunity to help and to be helped. The question is not whether children should receive death education, but whether the education they are receiving is helpful and reliable. Understanding of death is a life long process that continues from childhood through old age.
Death education begins when life begins.
Understand that mourning and sadness are appropriate for people of all ages and that children are people. Grief now walks with them. Numbness, denial, anger, panic, and physical illness are all variations on the theme of pain. These are normal, slow avenues of sorrow and loss. We need to manage the numbness, we need to manage the denial, the anger, and panic, and the physical illness.