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Article: Grief, Death, Funerals
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Grief, Death, Funerals
Death is clearly part of human experience, and yet children's experience of death depends heavily on their cultures' social customs and discourses surrounding death and funeral practices, beliefs regarding the afterlife, and norms of grieving. Any understanding of children's experiences with death must begin with the degree to which children are exposed to, or protected from, death and dying.
Exposure to Death
In many traditional societies, children were exposed to death on a regular basis, as mortality rates were often quite high. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, death rates among children in Europe and America were quite high: a third or more of ...