Does Death Have a Place in Children’s Fiction?

A child’s mind is a powerful thing.  It enables the child to constantly gather information from his/her environment.  Soon the child is able to remember truths that their parents and others tell him/her.  Next, a child learns that some stories are not true but are still worth telling, seeing, hearing, and reading.  A child is eventually able to make the logical conclusion that what happens in a fictional story is not necessarily possible in real life.  One thing that is not possible in real life is to avoid life’s end.

            Stories, even children’s stories seldom have characters that explicitly live forever.  But notice that characters in books, cartoons, and other entertainment for children almost never die during the story.

            Let me talk about comic strips for a minute.  By comic strips, I mean Peanuts with Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Garfield, Beetle Bailey, and Dennis the Menace; those multi-panel strips that have appeared in newspapers for over a century.  I can think of only one comic strip character who has ever died and that was a dog.  Furthermore, many comic strip characters do not age.

            Why to creators of children’s entertainment generally avoid death?  Maybe because they think it would be too traumatic for young children.  Adults are held fully responsible for handling anything distressing they may come across in our world.  Kids, on the other hand, are not considered fully capable of coping with everything.

            I do remember two cartoons that were on TV on Saturday morning when I was growing up in which a character die.  There was a Smurfs episode in which Smurfette’s pet mouse dies and Papa Smurf gently tells her “Death eventually comes to all living things.  Every flower must die, every insect, every creature.  Death is a part of life.”  It is really no different from what a child goes through when a family pet dies.  Perhaps the writers are hoping this message will help the very young people who make up the bulk of Smurfs fans. 

            Spider Man and His Amazing Friends, also on NBC in in their early 1980’s Saturday morning lineup and my personal favorite had an episode dealing with the origin of Spider Man.  In this episode, Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben dies as a result of a home burglary.  NBC did not want to include his death in this cartoon, but Stan Lee insisted on it.  Finally, it was agreed that it would be obvious that Uncle Ben died but the word “died” would not occur in the episode.  This burglar is one who Spider Man previously could have but did not capture but did not even try to capture.  This explains why Spider Man works as a crime fighter and why he is hyper-protective of his Aunt May.  I can see how Stan Lee could have thought the story would not work without this plot point.

Most absurdly, GI Joe cartoons had intense military battle scenes with bombs exploding and guns being fired, but nobody is killed.  There was valid concern among parents who thought that kids might get the impression that war is fun.  They didn’t want to discourage their offspring from someday serving in the military.  They wanted them to understand that sometimes people die in combat.

            Most of the Harry Potter books have a major character die.  The book series gets increasingly dark as it progresses to the final book.  Each book acknowledges darkness in our world and shows how Harry Potter and his friends deal with it in their world.

            Does death have a place in children’s entertainment?  I will have to let you, that’s right, you the reader, decide.  I will only say that acknowledging the reality of death is probably the first step to helping children cope with it.