A percepção das crianças sobre a morte em situações inesperadas.

Abstract

It is known that death is a topic that causes a great deal of anxiety for the children and also for the adults and therefore they find it very difficult to deal with this matter. What happens is that often death is hidden and not spoken. This article aims to present results of the study of how children perceive death in unexpected situations in different age groups of development. Fifteen children, between 3, 6 and 8 years old, has participated. For this, the descriptive and qualitative research method was used. A narrative interview was applied in a playful way through four stories in which we describe unexpected death situations. As results we obtained the following categories: physical pain and feeling of sadness as main category and death (reversible or irreversible) and symbolic elaborations as intermediary. We conclude that as unexpected situations in which death are not significant in their perceptions of children about death.