Death in children's literature refers to how death, dying, and grief are represented in texts for children and young adults. Its portrayal has changed over time, reflecting shifts in cultural attitudes toward childhood, morality, and emotional development.Sasser, Marvin Tyler, "Advent of Denial of Death in Children's Literature" (2008). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 166. Early works often treated death as a natural or moralized part of life, while twentieth-century literature frequently avoided direct discussion of death.Danielson, Katie & Colman, Hailey. (2023). Supporting Children Through Grief: A Content Analysis of Picturebooks About Death. Early Childhood Education Journal. 52. 1413-1422. 10.1007/s10643-023-01529-0. Since the mid-twentieth century, children's literature has increasingly presented death more directly and focuses more on targeting emotional responses such as grief and remembrance. Contemporary and global approaches commonly emphasize empathy and use narrative and visual elements to help young readers better understand death and loss.Clement, Lesley D., and Leyli Jamali. Global Perspectives on Death in Children's Literature. New York: Routledge, 2016. Web.Glasdam, Stinne & Gulestø, Ragnhild & Stilwell, Christie. (2025). Depictions of older adults residing in nursing homes: a Goffman-inspired thematic analysis of children's picture books in a Danish context. Frontiers in Sociology. 10. 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1588854.
Early history Until around the 17th century, there was very little literature written specifically for children.Butler, Francelia. (1972) Death in Children's Literature. Children's Literature v.1(1), 104-124. Oral storytelling and music accepted death as a matter-of-fact for both children and adults alike. Since mortality rates for children were much higher then, the subject was not taboo. The restoration of life, life as a preparation for death, death as a form of sleep, immortality, animals sacrificing themselves for humans, love as a conqueror of death, and inanimate objects that come to life were all common themes.
Examples of the changing approach to death include: The Juniper Tree by the Brothers Grimm, in which a boy is murdered by his stepmother, but comes back as a bird and kills the stepmother. The bird then turns back into a boy and is reunited with his father and sister. The stepmother, though, does not come back to life. As conceptions of childhood became increasingly idealized, literature began to distance children from the reality of death, often using fantasy or moral framing to soften or deny its finality.
Introduction of morality lesson Published between 1889 and 1913, Andrew Lang's Fairy Books series is another early example that contains numerous curated fairy tales and folklore with references to death.Day, A. (2019). “Almost wholly the work of Mrs. Lang”: Nora Lang, Literary Labour, and the Fairy Books. Women’s Writing, 26(4), 400–420. In one instance, the reader is encouraged to live a good or "perfect" life in order to go to Heaven after death. In others, both animals and humans gain immortality. The collection of fairy tales introduces a longstanding theme that bad people are supposed to stay dead and good, loving people should return to life. A more widespread example is Sleeping Beauty, in which a character's death is just a sleep that is conquered by love. These themes are also seen in the Slavic story Firebird and the retold versions of Le Morte d'Arthur by William Caxton and Robin Hood by Howard Pyle.
As faith is also a common factor in discussions and finding meaning in life and death, it is a frequent theme in early literary examples. A well-known example is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, originally written for children. Life is portrayed as a journey of faith that will end at the gates of heaven. Those having lived a good (in this case Christian) life, enter. Exemplified in Hans Christian Andersen's original Little Mermaid, the character must endure a journey, a form of suffering, and ultimately death for others, after which she is rewarded with an immortal soul. Aesop's Fables also contain such references both in the versions written exclusively for adults and those for both children and adults.
Early humor and normalization of death Mark Twain's "The Story of the Bad Little Boy" and "The Story of the Good Little Boy" satirize Christian morality tales written for children; the former detailing the life of a boy who cheats, steals, and lies, but ultimately grows up to be rich and successful without any repercussions for his actions, while the latter involves a boy who follows the morals in his "Sunday-school books" and receives unintended consequences for his good behavior, culminating in his untimely demise in a nitroglycerin-induced explosion along with "fourteen or fifteen dogs".
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, she jokes that if she falls and dies, she will be "quite a story back home". There is also the Mother Goose rhyme in which Humpty Dumpty falls and dies, because he is an egg that breaks and can not be re-built.
Early didactic interpretations Later this somewhat philosophical or spiritual approach would be replaced by a more scientific approach wherein the illusion of death as a form of sleep is denied and the decomposition of bodies is discussed. This viewpoint may have been popularized by Puritan beliefs that death is a punishment for sin. In favor of this argument would be such texts as James Janeway's nonfiction A Token for Children: An Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children.Gibson, Lois Rauch and Zaidman, Laura M. (1991) Death in Children's Literature: Taboo or Not Taboo? Children's Literature Association Quarterly v.16(4): 232-234. While life is still shown as fragile, emphasis is placed on the importance of salvation rather than on fantastical alternatives of rebirth as animals, immortality and such. Louisa May Alcott's well-known Little Women alludes to the story of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress while she concurrently shows the characters, including one who dies, as engaged and representative of a symbolic journey within the home. Even within this narrative, shifting attitudes are evident, as death begins to be treated less as an expected part of life and more as a disruptive event.
20th century to present
Death as narrative experience Into the 20th century, death becomes more of a plot device, such as in Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. In A Little Princess, Sarah Crewe's parents die while she is in England and, as a result, becomes maid. Mary Lennox's parents are killed and she is sent to live with her uncle, who is still grieving for his wife and unwilling to even meet his son for fear that he will die as well. In Bambi, the focal point of the story is the title character's survival through his mother's sacrifice. In these examples, death is treated much more subtly, alluded to as something that happened previously, not something to discuss frankly with children.
In 1958, Margaret Wise Brown published The Dead Bird, a simple picture book in which children find a dead bird, that scholars say "broke publishing ground." Just a few years later, children would hear about the deaths in the Vietnam War and the various political assassinations displayed on the news and in the media. Historical events such as these may have had an effect on why some parents and educators began to agree that death is a "fact of life" and is acceptable for children to be introduced to. At the same time, the cold, impersonal treatment of death begins to disappear in favor of the previous themes of leading a good life, love overcoming death, immortality, inanimate objects having or obtaining life, sacrificing one's life for others, and other such moral or "uplifting" themes. Still, even in the death-related books published in the 1970s and 1980s, feelings about death are discussed with children only 35% of the time and comfort was slightly more likely to be physical (54%) than verbal (48%).Seibert, D. and Drolet, J.C. (1993) Death Themes in Literature for Children Ages 3–8. Journal of School Health v.63(2), 86-90.
Death still continued to be used as humor and the subject of jokes, such as in the various versions of The Girl with the Green Ribbon, originally published in 1984, in which a young girl wears a green ribbon around her neck and a young boy asks her about it, but she puts him off.Randel, M. Implicit Violence in Women’s Short Stories. University of Texas at Austin, 2024. The two grow up together and eventually marry with the boy/man often asking her about the ribbon, but she continues to disregard the subject as "not important" or "not the right time". Finally when they are very old, she consents to have him untie the ribbon, and her head falls off.
Death as meaning making The 20th-century offered many contemporary examples of death in children's literature, especially centering death as a key moment or plot-driver of the book. In The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, a tree sacrifices itself for a boy it loves. Then later, the boy returns as an old man to the tree stump and the two comfort each other. In Charlotte's Web by E.B. White, the pig Wilbur is afraid of death and the spider, Charlotte, spends her life creating messages in her web in order to save him. When she dies, "she lives on through her 500 offspring" and through the love of Wilbur. In C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, an allegory to the Christian belief in Jesus, the lion Aslan sacrifices himself for the Pevensie children and later resurrects in time to vanquish the White Witch. In Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting, the Tucks have the fountain of eternal youth, but Winnie Foster chooses not to partake in this "life without death". Katherine Paterson's character Jess in Bridge to Terabithia is confused over the accidental death of his friend, Leslie. In A Taste of Blackberries by Doris Buchanan Smith, a child dies from an allergic reaction. In Admission to the Feast by Gunnel Beckman, a young character dies of cancer. In The Tenth Good Thing about Barney by Judith Viorst, the last good thing about the deceased cat, Barney, is that his decaying body helps the flowers to grow – a sort of "natural immortality".Corr, Charles A. (2003) Pet Loss in Death-Related Literature for Children. Omega-Journal of Death and Dying v.48(4): 399-414.
Animals and death