Sorry - advice on telling 2 year old about dog dying

[mummymojo]

We had to put our 15 year old dog down today - me and Dh having been crying a lot and DS1 who is 2.8 years is puzzled.

We are waiting for him to ask where the dog is but haven't really worked out what to say. Any advice?

mummymojo - my dog died last month at 20 yearsold. DS2 who has just turned 2 hardly noticed. DS1 was absolutely devastated as he had her all his life (he's 20).

DS2 isn't/wasn't bothered in the least to be honest, in fact when my mum died when ds1 was 10, it didn't bother him much .

I would just tell ds1 that you are both sad because your dog has gone. If he asks where the dog's gone, you can say Heaven or whatever your beliefs are.

When I ask my ds2 where the dog is, he looks to where she used to sleep, shrugs his shoulders and says "Gone" and runs off to do whatever he was doing!!!

Mummymojo I realy feel for you.....I went to a website like this and searched for her name. When we buried her, we planted the rosebush with her name over the spot.

Strangely, the day after my dog died we got 'adopted' by a cat!!

Thoughts are with you all

RTL

mummymojo - sorry jumped about in that last post. In answer to your question, I'd wait until he asks.

poor you, how about your dog. Think, on the whole, that under 5s are quite straightforward about deaths (of dogs, people, anything).
If your ds1 is very verbal, though, be prepared for what may seem to you like quite callous and insensitive questions: he may be more interested in the practicalities than the emotions. When my friend told her 3 year old that his Granny had died, he just said, 'Oh', then five minutes later, 'Can we have her cat?'

sorry to hear about your dog .when our guinea pig died we told ds that it had run away.he seemed ok with that.then when dh's nan died a few weeks ago,ds asked 'is nan going to be buried in grandmas garden with sooty?' (sooty was the g.p.he never before said he knew it had died.

I think you need to explain it to him. As others have said, he won't understand entirely, but this is an important lesson to learn about life (and death). The younger you are when you first learn it, the less frightening thing is seems to be iykwim.

The other day dd and i drove past a dead fox, she asked me what the fox was doing, i told her i thought it had died there. She said is he happy mummy. I said not really because when you die you are not really there anymore, you can just see the body, but we don't have feelings of happy or sad.
She said will you die mummy, i said yes we all do one day, but not for a very long time. She questioned about other members of the family, and i explained that all will die but not for a long time. She said wow did you see that red car go by?

, is that a perfect example of how unaffected children can be?

Sorry just read stephanies post, that is a perfect example of how intuitive they are isn't it? I think that shows how important it is to be honest, otherwise you are in danger of letting them make up their own explanations for things that could be horribly wrong, the truth is always going to be better!

Sorry about your dog mummymojo. I know how hard it is because we had to have our 16 year old dog put down just over a year ago. My dds were 2 and 4 at the time. Dd1 was quite upset, dd2 less so, though she picked up on dd1's emotions a bit (more than mine and dh's). I am a believer in being as straightforward as possible. I told them that the dog had died and that meant that it was as if his body had gone to sleep, but he wouldn't wake up, and he wasn't really inside it any more. We don't have a belief in life-after-death, so didn't go down the 'doggy heaven' route, but just explained that the dog had been very poorly and couldn't get better, and now he wasn't poorly any more. Dd1's brilliant explanation (which she came up with by herself, and dd2 then adopted) was that 'Bobby has gone out of the world'. That seemed to be understandable to them. (Having said that, dd1 also regularly tells me that Bobby lives on a star with my - long-dead - grandma, not sure where she got that from, but I let her go on with it if she wants.) I did gulp and change the subject a bit when she asked what happened to Bobby's body if he wasn't in it any more. I didn't think she'd cope with the idea of cremation. We had him cremated and then scattered his ashes on the beach, which was his favourite place in the world (just me and dh, though, without the kids). I had a romantic notion of casting his ashes out to sea, but the wind was in the wrong direction and kept blowing them back all over me... and then we decided that it was just like when he used to dash into the sea and come running out and shake all over us... and we were laughing and crying at the same time!

Hope this helps a bit. I'd take the lead from your ds and tell him as much or as little as he wants to know, but I wouldn't avoid the subject altogether.