No Stupid Questions

Since you didn't give the age of the kid, I'll propose a middle ground between fully lying and being too hard on the kid:

When I was little my dad told me our dog passed away in his sleep and he didn't want me to see it. He talked about the joys of life and the negatives and how he wasn't really living anyways at his old age.

In actually the dog got so old it could hardly stand by himself so he went to the vet and got him put down. He explained this a couple years later when I was old enough to understand, though I did put two and two together by that point.

"Hey kid, your dog died."

My family never did the “live on a farm” thing. I thought that was just a TV trope. Don’t lie to kids about that stuff. They will experience death more often as they grow up, and it is on us as parents to help guide them through the grieving process and give them the coping skills they will need to handle loss.

Death is part of life.
Grief and sadness too. There's no reason to keep these from small children.

Just yesterday a 4yo told me about the death & burial of their grandfather. Yes, she cried. But she's a very happy child.

Of course you help them process it. Books and stories can help.

I'd say the Scary Movie 3's "everyone around you is dying" is better than what my parents did once our cat was old and put down. They lied that the neighbor had droven over him and he had suffered so they had taken the cat to the vet to be put down. I got to pet the dead cat before we all buried him in our garden. I held hatred towards the neighbor until I grew old enough to see through the lie..

So I'd say that the petting, goodbyes and burial was good. But the lie was unnecessary. You can be pretty damn honest with kids, they like it because they're always lied to.. I loved adults who were honest with me and I see kids like me when I'm honest to them.

When I was 9 years old, my golden lab got hit and killed by a car.

He was always an outdoors dog. He just showed up on our country property when I was about 3-4 years old and decided to stay there, so we vaccinated him and gave him a collar. I named him Rusty because of his coloring.

He was an old dog at the end. Blind in one eye, hearing was going, and he had bad arthritis. He liked to just lounge around and fawn over me. Sweetest dog ever. There's a lake across the road from my house, through a thin forested property, and he would trot down there for a swim every now and then to soothe his aching bones. One day, he popped out of the woods on his way home and got hit by a car on the road.

My mother didn't plan to tell me about it. She didn't want to risk traumatizing me with my first death, so she was just going to ignore it for as long as possible. Rusty would disappear for days on end, so it wouldn't be unusual for him to be gone for a while. Then when I'd start asking questions, she'd suggest that he probably migrated somewhere new.

I was playing in my front yard one day when a minivan came up my driveway. A lady hopped out and handed me a small plastic bag. She said, "Here's your dog's collar. I figured you'd probably want it. I'm sorry for what happened to him." Then she just hopped back in her car and drove off, leaving me staring blankly after her. 'What was that all about?!'

I went inside and showed my mom the bag, told her some lady just handed it to me, and asked her what happened to Rusty. My mom immediately broke down crying, which made me cry, and we both just hugged and cried for a while.

My mom was furious that some lady just handed off a dead dog's collar to a 9-year old instead of finding an adult. She explained what happened to Rusty and said they were going to bury his remains in our backyard. She absolutely refused to let me see him, though. She said she wanted me to remember him as the childhood friend I grew up with, not as a corpse run over by a car. I wasn't allowed into the field out back behind my house until my dad had finished burying him.

So yeah, my first experience with death was with my first dog, and my mother could've handled it much better. But getting a good cry out with her did wonders for helping me deal with it.

How old is the kid? I still wouldn't know without more information, but theres a massive difference between a 4yo and a 10yo

Everyone with a live dog, raise your hand!

Sally, put your hand down.

Our dog died badly and the kids witnessed it. It was sudden. The dog's lungs filled with fluid.

The kids still talk about that day sometimes.

We had to resuscitate the dog enroute to the vet.

That was a hard day.

You tell them. You explain it. And you focus on the joy of the dog's life, while acknowledging the grief because the dog is gone.

Had to go trough this with our 3yr old 2 years ago. dog got an untreatable cancer diagnosis. We bought a daniel tiger book about his fish dying and read it to her quite a few times. We also kept mentioning that the dog was sick. A couple of months later the dog had to be put to sleep, we did this during her naptime and told her beforehand that she (dog) was going to die like the fish in the book.

My daughter was sad after, but not devastated (I was) and to this day she will out of nowhere say that she misses our dog Bailey

*edit to clarify my daughter wasn't dying

The “best” way is to prep them before it happens and explain what’s coming

Relevent clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiH3tZoNgmE

Hey, do you remember the dog?