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Summer’s End and Sad Goodbyes: Children’s Picturebooks About Death and Dying

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Abstract

This article explores children’s picturebooks about death and grieving by considering both psychological and literary aspects. Two questions frame this analysis: How can picturebooks, particularly written for young children, support children’s grief when someone dies? How do the illustrations and text of picture books express and convey the aesthetic and emotional experience of loss? Using both psychological research on children’s grief reactions and literary analysis of picturebooks, this paper reviews picturebooks that have been published on the topic of death from 2001 to 2011 and then closely analyzes three books that span a range of topics and approaches to death. Findings indicate that children’s picturebooks convey important psychological and cultural issues through text and illustrations. Furthermore, understanding some of the psychological and literary features of children’s picturebooks that address death and grieving can help educators to provide support and understanding for children when they experience loss.

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Notes

  1. NoveLit Plus is a database of fiction and non-fiction literature that allows searches using specific age ranges and years of publication. It was designed for librarians as a way to search by topic; it features articles, book reviews, and thematic book lists and was adopted by my university library to aid in researching children’s books. There are some limitations to using a search engine such as this one; specifically, that searching by age range can be problematic, the books are limited to those published in the United States and managed by the administrators of the program, and the topic search is only as effective as the keywords or labels placed on the book. Nonetheless, NoveList Plus provided me with a starting point for analyzing a number of the books published in the past 10 years and was informative because the database gave a plot summary along with a picture of the front cover.

  2. Some books focused on death without a main character and one book had both a dog and owner die. Therefore, the numbers do not add up to exactly 89.

  3. A Metate is a ground stone tool used for processing grain and seeds. It is also referred to as a mortar.

  4. An ofrenda is an altar.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Elementary Education, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Angela M. Wiseman

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  1. Angela M. Wiseman
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Correspondence to Angela M. Wiseman.

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Angela Wiseman is an Assistant Professor of literacy education and teaches reading and language arts methods courses in the elementary education program. Her research focuses on understanding classroom practices that promote an expanded view of learning through multimodal and transactional theories of literacy. Dr. Wiseman’s teaching and research have been guided by the concepts of social justice and the importance recognizing students’ “funds of knowledge.” As a former elementary school teacher and reading specialist, Dr. Wiseman’s understanding of literacy learning is grounded in her classroom experiences and interactions with students in diverse urban and suburban settings.

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Wiseman, A.M. Summer’s End and Sad Goodbyes: Children’s Picturebooks About Death and Dying. Child Lit Educ 44, 1–14 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-012-9174-3

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