David Kessler offers guidance on telling your other children that their sibling has died. He emphasizes age-appropriate explanations and addresses the guilt siblings often feel after a child's death.
How do I explain the death of our child to our other children?
In explaining death to your other children, you want to do it in a group, but you also want to do it individually because they're going to be different ages. You want to explain it differently for the different ages and also tell them that their brothers and sisters are going to feel differently about this loss. They probably also had different feelings about the loss. Also, to help them understand, they may have been angry with a sibling, they may have been upset with a sibling and that that did not cause the death. And to explain to them that we all as kids get mad at each other and play with each other, and to help them not to have a sense of guilt about things they were doing in normal play.
