How to Teach Your 2 Year Old About Death

With young kids your job as a parent is to teach them some of life’s lessons like how to behave, what manners to use, which words are okay to say and which are not, etc.

But one thing farm life does is speed up some of those tough, hard to swallow conversations – revealing the hard facts of life sooner than we would like.

It was a sunny, but cold late winter day. One of our Holstein mommas had had a baby bull (boy) calf. Mother Nature had brought this calf into the world into wet, cold conditions – definitely not ideal for a newborn baby.

So as farmers do, they:

✔️Bring the calf into a warm place, our was our heated shop

✔️Dry the calf off

✔️Give it a bottle of milk to eat

✔️Wrap it up in a lot of warm blankets

✔️Say a little prayer

Now we had done this and our girls at the time (4 and 2) saw him an asked all the questions curious little minds do:

“Why is there a calf in the shop?”

“Why is the calf covered in blankets?”

“Do we need to feed it?”

“What happens if it needs to go potty?”

“Will it be okay?”

Did that last one tug at your heart strings like it did mine? Oof! A lot of these situations are touch and go. Some go great, and others ended sadly. The next day my girls came back to the farm and asked to go see this cute little baby calf in the shop. Guess what I had to tell my 2 year old – “I’m sorry honey the calf didn’t make it. It died.” She just looked at me and didn’t say much. I told her the calf had gone to heaven and it wasn’t sick anymore.

Seriously as a mom I was totally not ready to have the death talk with my children. Honestly, I thought I’d have the birds and the bees talk before this one. However, what I didn’t take into account was the life of a farmer. It’s also probably why I, like many farmers, am a lot more okay with it than most because we have seen the circle of life and unfortunately it isn’t always fair.

Many farmers can’t even count the number of times they have spent hours with a sick animal or the amount of veterinary bills to ensure a good life for these animals. But sometimes it just isn’t in the cards. And it crushes our soul each and every time. We don’t take it lightly, but our faith is what helps get us through.

As for my kiddos, they have learned the life lesson of death where they are okay with it and understand it’s a part of life. Do I wish I could have kept the rose colored glasses on a bit longer for them? Oh yes! But on the other hand, I love that they have seen our vulnerability around death and the dedication we have to our animals.