Despite an ever increasing willingness by purveyors of the print and broadcast media to portray death in both dramatic and documentary formats, it remains an anxiety-laden topic. This is no less true for adults than for children, since death means loss-the permanent loss of loved ones and, ultimately, the loss of oneself. There are three widely held assumptions about death and how it affects children: first, that children do not understand death, second, that adults, on the other hand, do, and third, that even if children were able to understand death, it would be harmful for them to be concerned about it (Kastenbaum and Costa, 1977). These assumptions, however, are clearly superficial and, in fact, often quite invalid. The understanding of death is an evolving process inextricably linked to our own loss histories. In addition, there is strong evidence that one's level of cognitive development plays a central role in the perception and interpretation of loss events.
Efforts to explore and articulate aspects of death-related behavior in children have followed two distinct pathways. The first has focused on the healthy child's conceptualization of death, while the other approach has dealt with the dying child's awareness of death. The existing body of literature provides general validation for the theory that the child's conception of death follows a developmental sequence regardless of the cultural, emotional, or physical context in which the child is studied, although the content of the child's actual responses is clearly quite situationally dependent.