Do you tell your kids the fish is dead?
Posted by Sarah on May 5, 2009
I read a post on a beauty forum a few weeks ago from a woman who’s children’s betta was dying.
She’d already replaced one dead betta without telling her kids that their fish had died, and she was asking if she should replace this one if the fish died, or if she should just tell her kids the fish was dead.
What would you do?
Since I don’t have kids yet, I’m not really sure what I’d do, but I think that I’d tell the kids the fish died.
My sister and I had a fish tank when we were younger, and although I’m sure that some of the fish died, I really don’t remember anything about it, so I guess I wasn’t too traumatized by their deaths.
I do remember that our rabbit died when we were young, and our dog died when I was a teenager, and I was traumatized by that.
I don’t know if experiencing death through the fish first helped with the loss of the other pets, but I think it must have.
Since we have so many fish now, and since some of them are hard to find around here, we aren’t going to be able to replace the fish without the baby knowing.
After all I’ve never seen sapphire green discus around here, and even if we did, I don’t think I will want to spend $40-60 to keep the baby blissfully unaware of death for a little bit longer.
Is that wrong?
What am I thinking – there’s no way we could match the size of the discus and some of the other fish that are sold as juveniles even if they did carry them locally.
Even with some of our more common fish, I wouldn’t want to put them into a tank without quarantining them, unless I was sure that the replacement fish were healthy.
I’ve heard rumors about replacing dead fish or dead pets with other pets that looked the same, or very similar.
Some kids never find out, some kids do, but pretend they don’t know the pet was replaced, and some kids find out and feel betrayed that their parents lied to them, which can really damage the trust between the parents and their kids.
Have you ever replaced your kids dead fish with a new one?
Would you ever do that, or would you tell your kids the fish died?
Have your parents ever replaced your dead fish?
How did you find out about it?
How did you tell your kids the fish is dead? | Northern Lights Aquatics Fish Blog said,
[...] I wrote Do you tell your kids the fish is dead, a couple of people have found the site searching for “How do you tell your kids the fish is [...]
Andrew said,
Depending on the age of your child you should or should not tell them. It also really depends on your religious affiliation. I’d say as long as the kids are over 6 or so telling them the fish went to ‘fishy heaven’ would be the right thing to do. Young children have no knowledge about death/dying and it isn’t a good idea to get them warmed up to the idea at too young of an age, but they need to learn some time.
Sarah said,
Andrew – what do you tell the kids when they ask what happened to the fish?
More than likely they’re going to notice that the fish, or whatever it is is gone, and wonder what happened to it.
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