Children ask questions about illness, dying and grief that adults would rather avoid. Canadian researchers looked at exactly what those questions are.
What was studied
At a free grief camp in Ontario, children aged 5 to 17 who have lost a close family member write anonymous questions on slips of paper every year. They can ask anything. The researchers analysed 710 of these handwritten questions, collected between 2009 and 2024. They looked for patterns: what are the questions about, and what might the child want to understand? Who asked which question was not recorded. So there is no age, no cause of death and no link to the person who died.
What came out of it
The questions covered six topics: the body, conditions, dying and death, grief, existential questions (about meaning or God, for example) and personal questions, for instance to the people running the camp. The researchers also describe six functions: what a child wants to understand or sort out with a question. Think of “Is this contagious?”, “Is it my fault?” or “Who will take care of me?”. A question often fits in more than one place. “Why do people have to die?” asks for an explanation about the body, but it also touches on sadness and meaning.
Children often handed in questions of very different weight together. One child wrote five questions on one slip, including how to understand grief, why they need cream for their face and how people get cancer. The researchers read this as a back and forth between grief and just being a child, as it is also described in the grief literature. What was behind the face cream, only the child knows.
Many questions were existential, such as “Why do people have to die?” and “What is the meaning of life?”. The authors take this as a reason not to assume that children can only ask abstract questions from a certain age. They base that on the questions themselves and on their experience at the camp, not on a test of age.
44 questions did not fit anywhere: jokes, trivia and questions about camp. The authors felt that these deserve an answer too. A child may want to know whether their question is taken seriously, or may be looking for a moment of lightness.
How strong is this
This is a qualitative analysis of questions from one camp, so it is not a representative sample. Children who do not come to a camp like this are missing. Nothing is known about age, culture, cause of death or how long ago the death was. Follow-up questions in the conversations were not written down. With anonymous questions you cannot ask further, and the researchers themselves say that only the child knows what is behind a question. The team knows the camp from the inside and read the questions with that experience. Whether the framework really helps in conversations was not studied.
What this means for practice
- Answer on more than one level. A question often holds information, a feeling and a question about meaning at the same time, and you do not know which one the child is looking for. Give the facts and acknowledge what may be behind them.
- Take every question seriously, including the joke or the side step. You do not know what is behind it.
- If you have no answer, staying and acknowledging how big the question is can also be an answer, according to the authors.
Read the article (PMC, open access) · DOI
Source
Eaton Russell, C., et al. (2026). “Ask us anything”: A framework for understanding bereaved children’s questions about illness, dying, and grief. Palliative Care and Social Practice, 20. https://doi.org/10.1177/26323524261460926