The Care of the Child Facing Death

Abstract

To say that death is the twentieth-century taboo is now a cliché but this does not diminish its truth. With the decrease in infant mortality (Table 1), together with an increase in survival rates of many conditions of later childhood, the death of a child is now sufficiently rare to produce an embarrassed reluctance to communicate on the part of other people, leading to a potentially devastating sense of isolation on the part of the family of one who is sick. Here can be seen two contexts within which to consider the care of children facing death: the social and the family. The work of various organisations — Cruse, for example — is part of a movement eroding the taboo nature of death and the phenomenon, having been acknowledged, can now be left. The context of the family, and to a lesser extent the school and hospital, will remain central to the rest of this paper.