Moth: Design for Life & Death: The Goodbye Box and Saying Goodbye to Mr Jim

Pet attachment plays an important role in a child’s social, emotional and cognitive development.

Pets provide an opportunity for children to learn, practice, and become motivated to nurture another living being, and to practice perspective taking skills. Pet care can potentially facilitate and foster a child’s moral development, as they begin to reason about issues of justice, kindness, fairness, and what is seen as morally ‘right’ with respect to animals and animal welfare1.

Our pets lives are short and the love and loss of them is heart breaking and for many children the loss of a pet is often their first experience of death; it is complex and confusing. Dying is also an expensive business - it is socially and economically exclusive. Moth and the Blue Cross Animal Charity (Pet Bereavement Service) are working together to help deliver the Goodbye Box as a product/aid to help children and adults cope with bereavement. It facilitates conversations about life (and afterlife), eulogies, funerals and grief as well as practical guidance for adults. Our natural instinct is to protect children from sadness, but death is a natural part of life and it is important to see it as an opportunity to learn from rather than fear. This paper discusses the impact of pet bereavement and grief in childhood and the importance of initiating honest conversations with children about death as being a natural and meaningful part of our lives.

1 Childhood Attachment to Pets: Associations between Pet Attachment, Attitudes to Animals, Compassion, and Humane Behaviour Roxanne D. Hawkins, Joanne M. Williams and Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Scottish SPCA) 2 University of Edinburgh, Medical School 2017.