Diversity in Children's Understanding of Death
Title
Diversity in Children's Understanding of Death
Creator
Callanan MA
Identifier
Publisher
Monographs Of The Society For Research In Child Development
Date
2014
Description
Rosengren, Miller, Gutiérrez, Chow, Schein, and Anderson have written a powerful and important monograph focused on the fascinating topic of children's understanding of death. Combining multiple methods, converging data sources, and diverse theoretical approaches, their findings tell us that children may know more about death than their parents expect, that even children within a given community vary a great deal in their access to information about death, and that children's reasoning about life and death is related to the views of those around them. Their work highlights children's active role in their own cognitive development while showing how children's thinking is embedded in both cultural practices and religious ideas. This commentary discusses four topics highlighted in the monograph: the value of taking a sociocultural approach to studying development, the relative avoidance of religion in cognitive developmental research, potential pitfalls of cultural comparison, and the generative notion that conflicting ideas on a topic are likely to coexist in the same minds. The discussion highlights positive contributions of this monograph, raises critical concerns, and suggests future research directions.
2014
Rights
Article information provided for research and reference use only. PedPalASCNET does not hold any rights over the resource listed here. All rights are retained by the journal listed under publisher and/or the creator(s).
Type
Journal Article
Citation List Month
Backlog
Citation
Callanan MA, “Diversity in Children's Understanding of Death,” Pediatric Palliative Care Library, accessed April 24, 2024, https://pedpalascnetlibrary.omeka.net/items/show/14823.