Lifetimes: The Beautiful Way to Explain Death to Children

Product Information

I was particularly drawn to this title because it can be tailored to a variety of religious belief systems. Butterflies, flowers, birds, ants, fish, trees, rabbits and people; they all have a lifetime and no matter how long or how short that lifetime might be all lifetimes have a beginning and an ending with living in between. It explains the cyclic nature of life and death for animals, plants and people in a matter of fact, beautiful and poignant way. But we are all going to die, every one of us, and this book can help to understand that without fairy tales or hysteria.

This sensitive book is a useful tool in explaining to children that death is a part of life and that, eventually, all living things reach the end of their own special lifetimes.

This is a simple and straight forward explanation of the biological sequence of birth, life, and death for children with realistic illustrations from the animal and vegetable kingdoms. With over 6 million of the world’s best eBooks to choose from, Kobo offers you a whole world of reading. What is great about this book and something I didn't realize at the time was that lifetimes didn't have to only related to death of people.

This book talks about death in all living things in a matter of fact manner and helped us have deeper conversations too.

Our lives are mostly longer than those of butterflies, shorter than those of trees, but no matter how long we live, we are also beautiful and fragile creatures. Sadly the print result is under their quality level, but I think it's a problem of how the originals were scanned/digitalized. I would caution against using this book as a regular picture book for toddlers and older preschoolers because it may actually introduce the idea of death before a child is able to comprehend the explanation. The illustrations by Robert Ingpen are, of course, divine and I’d do just about anything to own one of the original illustrations. Robert Ingpen is an award-winning illustrator of numerous books, including The Encyclopedia of Events That Changed the World, The Encyclopedia of Ideas That Changed the World, and The Encyclopedia of Mysterious Places (all Penguin Studio).