Diversity in children's understanding of death

Rosengren, Miller, Gutiérrez, Chow, Schein, and Anderson have written a powerful and important monograph focused on the fascinating topic of children's understanding of death. Combining multiple methods, converging data sources, and diverse theoretical approaches, their findings tell us that children may know more about death than their parents expect, that even children within a given community vary a great deal in their access to information about death, and that children's reasoning about life and death is related to the views of those around them. Their work highlights children's active role in their own cognitive development while showing how children's thinking is embedded in both cultural practices and religious ideas. This commentary discusses four topics highlighted in the monograph: the value of taking a sociocultural approach to studying development, the relative avoidance of religion in cognitive developmental research, potential pitfalls of cultural comparison, and the generative notion that conflicting ideas on a topic are likely to coexist in the same minds. The discussion highlights positive contributions of this monograph, raises critical concerns, and suggests future research directions.