In contemporary Mexico on the Dia de los Muertos, children eat candy skulls and buy paper skeletons and low them apart with firecrackers. And they ask questions. From weaning to the first day of kindergarten to going off to camp, children learn to cope with loss. Death and Development Long before children know the word death, they are learning to cope with absence, loss, and the idea of nonbeing. They are willing to endlessly practice blowing out a match and turning lights on and off, not to mention flushing household items down the toilet.
Women live longer than men.
Some of the most influential research about children's understanding of death was published in 1948 by the clinical psychologist Maria Nagy, who found that children under five years of age tended to think of death as a reversible process, like sleep. A parent who goes out to the movies may seem, to a young child, to have totally disappeared. A child this age may try to make a dead bird fly, or put a fallen leaf back on a tree. A young child's confusion is not surprising, because the difference between dead and alive is fuzzier than we tend to think. The child, who knows that his toenails can get clipped or his hair cut, tries to figure out if there is any part of him that he can't lose without ceasing to exist.