Children's conceptions of death and suicide

Irreversibility, nonfunctionality, and universality of Death and the concept of suicide are considered understood by most children by age 7-10 years. A total of forty 4 to 5-year-olds and 7-8 year olds were recruited to examine whether education programme would foster the development of death concept and thus affect children’s attitude towards suicidal behaviour in later life. A local popular video clip extracted from an animation ‘‘My life as McDull’’ was used for exploring the concept of death among very young children in HK while a short story ‘‘The poisonous apple’’ was used to investigate children’s dis/approval of killing oneself.