About under 5s

Children up to the age of 5 years do not view death or loss as permanent. Rather they look upon it as a temporary absence, or that dead people live on under changed circumstances. Children's perceptions of death are often influenced by the deaths they see represented in the media, especially in cartoons where characters, such as Wylie E. Coyote, bounce back to life after fatal accidents. Children often use magical thinking which means that they can believe that they caused the death through their actions, for example telling the person to go away.