EXPLAINING DEATH TO CHILDREN

In what one contributor to this excellent symposium describes as our ""death-denying, death-defying culture,"" there has been no reconciliation of death--in life, just as adults who haven't come to terms with the problem have not been able to explain it to children. There has been no important treatment of the subject in many years and Marjorie Editha Mitchell's minimal The Child's Attitude to Death (Schocken-p. 468) earlier this year was hardly a corrective. This book has both value for parents and professionals: the former will be particularly helped by editor Grollman's practical advice on handling the problem (what to say at what age; what not to say; how a child reacts; etc.) and both parents and teachers will welcome Eulalie Steinmetz Ross' discussion and recommendations of ""Children's Books Relating to Death."" As for the latter, various theologians of different religions, a psychiatrist and psychologist, a biologist and an anthropologist, all discuss death with relation to their particular faith and/or science and sociologist Fulton's ""On the Dying of Death"" and the various aspects of its repudiation and denial is particularly stimulating. All in all, the subject here has been removed from its winding sheet of sentimental euphemism or embarrassed evasion, and the book has analytical, affirmative an constructive values for all.