ong been interested in children¡s concepts of death. Essentially, many years of research suggests that the understanding of death progresses from an immature understanding in early childhood to a more mature understanding in older childhood and adolescence, consistent with different stages of cognitive development. It is widely believed that infants do not have formed concepts about death. Children in the preschool years have immature concepts of death, understanding death as a temporary restriction, sleep, or departure and believing that the dead can be brought back to life spontaneously, by administering food, medical treatment or magic.
             During their school years, children come to develop a more mature understanding of death. Such an understanding requires the ability to grasp abstract concepts such as universality, nonfunctionality and irreversibility. Universality refers to the understanding that all living things die; irreversibility is the understanding that after a living thing has died, its physical body cannot be made live again; and nonfunctionality refers to the understanding that all life-giving functions cease at death. These three concepts have been frequently used in studies that show wide variations in the chronological ages at which these concepts are acquired. For example, the age at which the understanding of the universality of death is acquired ranges from 4 years to 10 years and older in others. Such a variation may be attributed, in part, to the differences in the procedures used or the populations sampled in different studies. It seems that the grasping of these concepts is stable, and once understood, children will not regress to less mature understandings. It was found that most children acquired one or the other of these three concepts in the early school years, but fewer than half achieved all of them, suggesting that at least a four year period is needed for a child to fully grasp what death mea...