A child's understanding of death shifts with age and psychological development. While research specific to children with intellectual disabilities remains sparse, knowing these developmental stages helps us meet each child where he or she actually is—at the level they can truly grasp.
Birth to Three Years
For the first six months, a newborn cannot distinguish her own body from her mother's. Death feels like an unbridgeable rupture. Her body absorbs the anxiety and distress of the adults around her.
After six months, the child begins to sense herself as separate from her mother. A separation becomes an abandonment—one she expresses through devastating withdrawal or visible anguish.
Acutely sensitive to shifts in routine, the child's emotions mirror those of the adults she depends on.
What to Do and How to Be
Watch for changes in sleep, appetite, or behavior. Meet her need for safety and tenderness by staying close—someone she already knows and trusts. Speak to her simply and clearly about what is happening around her. Name her distress: "I see you're sad. You miss your dad." But words alone are not enough. She needs your gaze, your touch, your affection—these tell her that she continues to live.
Three to Six Years
The child interprets everything through himself. Being alive, he cannot grasp that someone he loves has died. Death, to him, is reversible. He has no concept of permanence. He may feel guilty—because he sees himself as the center of the world. His logic for connecting events is loose at best.
His behavior puzzles adults: he laughs and shows little distress one moment, then becomes sad, angry, irritable, moody the next. He asks frequently when the dead person will come back.
What to Do and How to Be
Reassure him and name his emotions: "It's okay to be angry because your brother died." Ease any guilt: "When someone gets sick or dies, it's not anyone's fault." Explain the difference between serious illness and mild illness—he may fear things he has no reason to fear.
Answer simply, without excess detail, but with precision. Say "died," not "went on a journey." Never say "fell asleep"—he may become afraid of sleep.
Six to Nine Years
Now she begins to understand time itself. Words like "always" and "never" start to mean something. She grasps that death is permanent, yet accepting its reality and inevitability remains profoundly difficult. Anxiety follows: sleep becomes restless, her body grows agitated, and she tires abnormally.
A death in the circle around a child with intellectual disability can also deepen her sense of being different from her peers.
What to Do and How to Be
Pay close attention to her physical, psychological, and social responses. They show you the depth of her grief.
Is she more turbulent, hyperactive? Or withdrawn and flat?
It also helps if the adult can share his or her own emotions with her—without burdening her with them. She is capable of understanding and carrying them alongside you.
In the end, a child with intellectual disability who grieves is not fundamentally different from any other child. What matters is compensating for any gaps in understanding through language and gestures suited to her, so that all her other capacities for grasping reality can shine through.
Anne Bindels
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