When children return to a world that feels somehow different after their near-death experience, it is sometimes deeply unsettling for them.
Talking about a near-death experience can be traumatic.
Children may not be able to share what happened to them with anyone for months or even years because they first need time to process this event.
However, silence about the near-death experience is not always intentional. Children often have difficulty expressing their experiences verbally. In particular, younger children do not have the language skills yet to adequately put extraordinary or hard-to-describe events into words.
Drawing, painting, and playing can help children to express experiences for which words may initially be insufficient. Some children draw what they went through rather than talk about it. Elin, from our book Where the Light Begins, drew pictures of overlapping colors and lines that drifted across the page. Furthermore, children do not necessarily share their near-death experiences spontaneously or entirely.
Some children withdraw. But trying to understand it on their own can leave them feeling isolated. They also do not want to burden their parents. In addition, there is the fear of not being believed, particularly concerning how their parents might react when the children begin to talk about their near-death experiences. Rejection, shaming, or disbelief can therefore contribute to children remaining silent about their experiences or having difficulty making sense of them. As a result, children may become very reluctant to talk about their near-death experiences later on.
So, the reaction of the child’s family and social circle is a crucial factor. A child’s willingness to open up depends strongly on how parents, siblings, teachers, and other trusted individuals respond to them.
Near-death researcher Phyllis M. H. Atwater found that children forget their near-death experiences more often than adults. Memories of these happenings might be driven out of children at school or silenced by relatives when parents, family members, teachers, or religious authority figures ridicule children’s experiences, dismiss them as imagination, or tell the children not to talk about them. Children who do remember their experiences often keep them quietly to themselves, as a special secret.
The family’s denial of the experience can also lead to alienation within the family, so the bond between the child and their parents or other relatives is disrupted.
Some children develop behavioral problems and receive psychological support. Unfortunately, professionals have not always taken children’s reports of near-death experiences seriously in the past. Decades ago, at least until the 1980s, psychologists often dismissed children’s near-death accounts with the words, “You know children and their imaginations,” and they were unwilling to discuss the topic further.
Delayed sharing, selective silence, and dismissive reactions from adults or therapists often make behavioral problems worse.
Moreover, the amount of time that has passed since the near-death experience also plays a role. As time goes by, memories can become clearer, and children may feel more confident talking about what has happened to them.
Parents also need to process their child’s near-death experience, which is often reflected in changes in the child’s personality and behavior. These changes include behaving like a grown-up person in a little body, having no sense of fear or pain, and having a faraway look. A lack of familiarity with near-death experiences can make the acceptance of them and the adjustment to a changed child for parents and other family members difficult; they feel uncomfortable.
Sometimes parents desperately want to have the child they used to know back. Parents and other family members may differ in how easily they can talk about and accept the child’s near-death experience. The same applies to accepting the character changes in the child.
It seems that some religious parents are more likely to accept the near-death experience of their child than non-religious parents. One mother believed that her son had visited “the other side” and had been supported by angels or spiritual guides.
However, not every child encounters understanding when sharing their experience. Sometimes, a child’s near-death account does not correspond to their parents’ beliefs. Other parents feel embarrassed or think that their child is crazy. They cannot accept the event as real. Still others respond in a neutral way and advise the child not to deal with the experience any further. These are examples of reactions through which children learn that it is better not to talk about their experiences.
Another example of an inappropriate parental reaction involves a boy who told his psychologist about his experience, which prompted the boy’s mother to discontinue the therapy. The psychologist had described what happened to the boy as typical of a near-death experience, which displeased the mother.
When parents and other adults respond with understanding, children find it easier to return to their familiar everyday routines. The research on pediatric near-death experiences suggests that children should not be pressured to talk about their encounter with death. Instead, they should be given the space to decide for themselves when they wish to share it and how much they want to disclose.
What matters most is that children feel safe.
Parents can show that they are willing to listen and take their child’s words seriously without pressing for details. If a child spontaneously begins to talk, the conversation should not be postponed or the experience downplayed. Since some children already struggle to find words to describe such experiences, listening calmly and without judgment can be very helpful in easing the way back to everyday life.
Read true stories of children’s near-death experiences and how they responded to them in our book Where the Light Begins: Stories of Near-Death Experiences and After-Death Communications by Children and How They Experience Them Differently Than Adults.
Ralph and Daniela Klose are German authors and long-term collaborative partners in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and consciousness research. Their book Where the Light Begins explores near-death experiences in children.
Ralph is a retired neuropsychologist with over three decades of clinical and academic experience, and Daniela is a medical writer and translator specializing in neuropsychology and transpersonal psychology. For many years, they worked as ghostwriters for researchers across Europe. They now write under their own names, connecting scientific expertise with years of hospice and end-of-life care experience to explore near-death-experiences and liminal states of consciousness. https://drklose.com
