Adults spend the first day after a death deciding what to keep from the children, and the children spend it working out that something is being kept from them. They are much better at noticing than they are at asking.

The finding, and it is not a soft one: children cope considerably better with a plain true answer than with a gentle one that turns out to be untrue. What frightens a child is not information. It is the sense that the adults are frightened and will not say why — because a child left alone with a gap fills it in, and the version they invent is nearly always worse than the truth and very often has them at fault in it.

Use the words died and dead

Say them. They are the two words the whole family will flinch at and they are the two that do not mislead anybody.

We lost him tells a small child that he can be found, and leaves them wondering why nobody is out looking. Gone to sleep turns bedtime into a hazard, and a child who has worked out what you meant will stop sleeping. Gone away teaches that people who go away do not come back, which will be tested the next time somebody goes to work. Passed on, at peace, taken, in a better place: every one of them is a sentence an adult finds softer and a child finds confusing.

The bluntness is the mercy. Grandpa died this morning. His body stopped working and it cannot be made to work again. He is not coming back, and it is not because of anything anybody did or said. Then stop talking and let them ask.

Be concrete about what dead means, because a young child will want to know and will not always ask: the body has stopped, so it does not breathe or eat, and it cannot feel anything at all — not cold, not pain and not frightened. Children under about five do not yet understand that death is permanent and will ask again as the fact arrives in pieces. That is not a failure of your explanation.

Answer the question asked, not the one you are afraid of

Are you going to die too, asked at breakfast, is usually not a question about mortality. It is a question about who would look after them. Answer that one: everybody dies one day, I am well and I expect to be here for a very long time, and if anything ever did happen there are people who would look after you — and then name them, because the names are the answer.

Did it hurt is a small factual question and it takes a small factual answer. So does what happens to the body, which is a practical question about a body: a plain sentence about burial or cremation, at the level it was asked, is less frightening than a swerve, and the swerve is what teaches them not to ask you things.

If a question sounds enormous, it is worth finding out what it actually is before answering it. What made you think of that, asked gently, will very often reveal a much smaller question underneath.

I do not know is allowed

Where are they now. Did it hurt. Why did it happen. Is there anything afterwards. You are permitted to say what you believe, and to say that other people believe other things, and to say that nobody knows for certain. A child can hold all three of those at once.

What a child cannot hold is two incompatible certainties from two different adults in the same kitchen. So it is worth the family agreeing on the words before anybody uses them — including the grandparents, and including whoever is doing the school run.

Expect the same question again next week, at bath time

Children process in fragments, and a question that comes back is not a sign that they were not listening. They are testing whether the answer is stable. Answer it the same way, with the same words. A different answer the second time teaches that the truth is negotiable and that this particular subject makes adults improvise.

The timing will be inconvenient, and that is not an accident either. It comes at bath time, in the back of the car, at the school gate, in a supermarket queue — the moments when the adult is beside them and not looking straight at them, which is the safest arrangement in which to ask a frightening question. If you possibly can, answer it there rather than promising to talk about it properly later.

Grief in bursts is not callousness

A small child will cry hard for four minutes, ask whether they can have a biscuit, and go back to a game on the floor. Adults find this shocking, and read it as not caring or not having understood. It is neither. A young child cannot hold a feeling that large for long and so takes it in short doses with play in between. The play is not a distraction from the grief; it is the way the grief is got through.

Older children and teenagers do the opposite thing, which looks equally wrong: the door closes, they go out with friends, they appear completely unaffected, and then they are furious about something unrelated. In a teenager, anger is grief more often than sadness is, and so is a sudden fierce concern with fairness.

The funeral: let them choose, and tell them everything first

Children who are offered the choice, with a real description of what will happen, mostly choose to come and rarely regret it. Children who are excluded from it frequently mind for years, and say so later. A choice made with nothing described is not a choice, so describe it:

The room, roughly how many people, and where the child will be sitting and who beside them.
That there will be a coffin at the front, and whether it will be open or closed.
That people will cry, including adults they have never seen cry, and that this is allowed.
How long it will last, what music there will be, and what happens at the very end.
What happens afterwards: the room, the food, and that people will talk and even laugh.

Give them a job if they want one, because having something to do is easier than being looked at: a drawing to put in, a flower to carry, a candle to light, a poem to choose, handing something to people at the door. Offer it and accept a no.

And arrange an exit. One adult whose only task that day is that child — not making a speech, not receiving anybody — who can take them outside the moment they have had enough, without anybody minding or noticing. The exit is the thing that makes staying possible.

Nobody should be made to look at the body or kiss the coffin. Offer, describe honestly what they would see, accept a refusal, and do not offer it a second time.

Tell the school

Before the child goes back, not after. The office and the class teacher on the same day, and the words the family is using, so that nobody at school says a different thing. It matters for the obvious reason and for two less obvious ones: a teacher who does not know will set a card-making task for a parents' day in the second week, and a teacher who does know will read a change in behaviour correctly instead of as defiance.

Ask them to tell you what they see. School is where a child does the grieving they have decided not to do in front of you.

Watch the child who is being conspicuously fine

In a great many families one child is a problem and one child is no trouble at all. The one being no trouble is usually the one to watch. Children work out very quickly which adult is closest to breaking, and adjust themselves to hold the household up; a nine-year-old who has decided to be the strong one will do it for years and be praised for it the whole time.

Say it to them out loud, more than once: it is not your job to look after me, you are allowed to be sad, and you cannot upset me by talking about him. Then find them one adult outside the house — an aunt, a teacher, a coach — whose good opinion they do not have to earn by coping.

If a child's sleep, eating or school has changed and stayed changed for weeks, or if a child believes the death was their fault and cannot be talked out of it, that is worth taking to a doctor. Asking is not an overreaction and it is not a judgement on anybody's parenting.

Talking to children about a death