Claire Crowe

So if they're quite sensitive or very emotional and you feel, gosh, I'm not sure if they are going to cope with this.

It's OK to have a like a reassessment of that situation.

And the third is their closeness to the person that died.

So it can be really helpful if the first funeral they're going to, it's someone who's a little bit more distant, actually.

Because they learn funeral etiquette and the world of an open casket in a kind of like safer way.

I had a seven-year-old who, again, didn't want to go to his grandmother's funeral.

And the mom kind of raised it with me.

And actually for that seven-year-old, it wasn't that he didn't want to go.

It's that he didn't want his granny to be dead.

So his thought process was, if I don't go, it's not happening.

Because, of course, at that age, seeing is believing.

I know.

And that's exactly what these parents wanted.

And, of course, in some circumstances, we have to bring the child to the funeral because it's someone in the immediate family.

There's no one else, you know, to mind our child.

For practical reasons.

Yeah.

So there's...

In those situations, what we did with this seven-year-old is we gave him a purpose.

We gave him an important job to do at the funeral.