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.

Everyone with a live dog, raise your hand!

Sally, put your hand down.

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

“Hey kid, your dog died.”

Don’t lie. You owe them the truth and it’s a learning opportunity for them to grow emotionally before having to deal with a human death. Emotional Intelligence is just as important as being able to read.

Analogies can help but don’t hide behind them. Greive together. Have a gesture, no matter how simple that encourages closure. Perhaps go through photos of the pet with them and ask which should be framed or printed or put on the fridge or something like that.

Talk to them about the emotions you are having, how those emotions feel and allow them to also have emotions, especially in the coming weeks when they miss them. But you don’t have to lie about what you are feeling or make a huge deal about. Don’t rush to fill the void too quickly. Comfort, yes, perhaps a new pet in due time. But not immediately as that cheapens the connection from being with an individual to being a role.

It sounds cruel for me to say I hope your kid has to endure many human deaths in their life but the alternative is either for them to have far too short of a life or for then to become unattached.

And I hope they will also be there for their friends when their friends have to deal with a loss. Kids model behaviour more then they do as they are taught, so it’s an opportunity to model that kind of behavior and emotional support.

There is a very well written children’s book “The Hare-Shaped Hole” which is a gentle way to explain loss.

It’s an uncomfortable, sweaty-palm conversation that needs to happen. Sugarcoating it isn’t going to help in the long run.

When I was a kid I had two cats. One of them, the older cat, got run over by a car one day. My parents told me about it that night. I was like 8 years old and it absolutely devastated me, but knowing what happened allowed me to grieve properly and let all of my feelings out.

My other cat just disappeared one day, and although I suspect that she also died in a similar manner, not knowing the truth always gave me hope that one day she would show back up on my doorstep meowing to be let inside.

My point is that if you try to obfuscate the subject, the risk is that your kid won’t properly understand what happened until much later in life and all the unprocessed emotions can cause trauma. Bluntness might seem cruel in the moment, but you have to do it. Ask for their full attention, sit them down, and tell them what happened, and offer comfort in whatever way you can. The news will hurt them, and they will possibly lash out at you, but eventually they will recover from it and go back to feeling normal again.

Good luck, OP.

I’d need more context to give you a real answer but personally:

Do it like any “we need to talk” adult talks, keep it simple explain what happened, give age appropriate details, and tell them it’s ok to cry/be mad/be sad for a long time, etc. encourage them to express their feelings in that moment and then in recovery share with them when something reminded you of the pet or things related to the pet, it seems counter intuitive but they are having these same thoughts and feelings and by saying them out loud you’re saying it’s ok to feel this and we can grieve together.

Hope this helps

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.

I was told our dog had gone to live on a farm. For a long time afterwards I pestered to be allowed to visit the dog on said farm, and was told it would be too upsetting for him. “He wouldn’t understand.”

Years later I found out the dog had run away, gotten into a field, and killed a sheep. He was identified by the farmer, and someone official came to our house and took him away to be shot.

I wish they had just told me he’d been run over.

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.

Tell the truth kindly. That doesn’t include comforting lies about “afterlife”.

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.

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