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I don't think kids have a problem with death. It's us older ones who are nearer to it, that start being frightened.

Every three seconds in the developing world, a child dies needlessly due to lack of basic health care and other things we all take for granted.

Once a child is confronted with the concept of death there's a certain innocence that goes.

You know how people say that young people feel immortal? I don't know what they're talking about. I was planning for how I would deal with my death in good conscience well before I even hit puberty.

Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.

As a child, I didn't know what they mean by 'to die.' So I grew up in a place where people used to die all the time, but a child is not allowed to see a dead body. When you ask, 'Where is so-and so?' you're told, 'He's gone to another world where we all go to live in the future.'

People start to act very unusually when they find out that they're dying, that they don't have that many years left.

When you're a kid, you have this feeling like you're indestructible. Your mortality doesn't even occur to you. But as time goes by, you realize, 'I better cut this out or that out if I want to continue to exist.'

There's a thing I think children realise at a certain age, which is that if their parents say, 'Don't do it', and they go ahead and do it, they're still not going to die. And I think that's what it is: that no matter what you do, you're not going to die.

Seeing to it that a youngster grows up believing not just in the here and now but also in the grand maybes of life guarantees that some small yet crucial part of him remains forever a child.