Is this weird for an 8 year old?

I remember when I was really quite young (8-10) I was terrified of dying. I would be crying at my parents, expecting them to make the fear go away. But they couldn't. At 8 I understood a lot more than I think anyone gave me credit for.

I wasn't scared of dying in the present but the future. I would imagine my life coming to an end in old age, imagine my consciousness fading away and then billions (infinite) years passing without me being conscious.

When I see other children they don't think about things like that. Why was i? What the ###$ is wrong with me? This continued to frighten me for many years.

It came to an end during 2010 when I experienced the greatest depression of my life. I felt sick, couldn't eat. Slept and cried all day. I cried out for a god to be real - which felt foolish and stupid.
Then eventually it felt like my brain was blocking every painful thought out. Every time I may have come close to imagining bad things my brain would not allow me to.

The mental block faded by the start of this year but the way I view everything has become messed up

I used to have this when I was around the same age, I think maybe slightly younger. I'm told my Mum actually took me to a psychologist because she was a bit worried. I used to ask what was the point in living if we are going to die one day anyway. I used to say I was scared that there was no God because if there wasn't then everything was pointless. I was scared of the 'nothingness' of being dead.

I don't think it is very unusual for a child. Fully grown adults cannot properly fully conceive of a the of a universe or of the idea that they are only alive for the briefest of moments in the grand scheme of it. When your mind is growing and expanding it isn't hard to see why a that is difficult for a child to handle. Looking back now I think more than anything it just shows I was thinking at a bit of a high level for someone under the age of 10. This probably sounds the same to you. I really think this is quite common though.

I started this type of thinking at around 8-10 years old. I'm 19 now and am still stuck with this mentality. I'm often able to block off the bad thoughts but sometimes it triggers panic attacks. This effects me particularly at night time when I'm trying to sleep. Last year I went through a phase of not being able to sleep and staying awake crying with fear. I am still in this sort of mentality and don't know how people can simply not be scared and not care. I get the impression that the fear decreases with age though, so I just live in hope that one day I will be able to accept my fate and stop denying that I am a mortal being.

Before this age, a child can't really comprehend death, and when they do become aware of the finality of death it can be a scary thing to comprehend for a child. This is the age when they begin to reason about many things in a more abstract manner, and to ask questions about the existence of God. I was eight when it logically occurred to me that Santa couldn't be real, that there were no fairies in the garden, and that unicorns and dragons were mythological creatures. At this age in middle childhood, when babyhood is far behind, and puberty is yet to come, a child goes through a lot of psychological and physiological changes, and their brains go through a growth surge. In spite of this, they are still children, and they are aware that they are small and vulnerable, and that they rely on adults to protect them. Sometimes they may also realise that their parents are mortal too, and this can be very scary. The thought of their own deaths can be equally frightening. In your case, I'm wondering if something could have compounded your fears, such as the death of a family member, or even a pet. Talking things through with a therapist can help you to make some sense of this, and to put your fears in perspective. The fact is that we all die. There may or may not be an afterlife, but we are all on this planet for a limited amount of time. Spending time worrying about the inevitable can prevent a person from getting the most of this life, from finding enrichment and enjoyment from it, and from using this time to grow and learn. Therapy can help you to find perspective, and to truly appreciate the present moment.

I had exactly the same stage at that age, where I found the concept of eternity and spending it dead and without consciousness or in an unknown afterlife terrifying, and from what I'm reading in the other replies it's a fairly normal development for a child of that age to undergo - I think, as someone's already pointed out way more articulately than I'm going to, that it's just a reflection of the child's mind and "philosophical" capacity maturing. One thing to think about is whether you could consider this 8- to 10-year-old phase in terms of Freudian psychosocial development and model your inability to move on from it as some kind of fixation, then if you see a therapist investigate any events taking place during that period which may have caused you to fixate on it.

Anxious, I went through the same thing at about the same age. I think Masq is right - it's when you first hit that point where you can comprehend it. Relatives of mine died before then, but I was young enough that I not only did not comprehend it fully, but had also not formed close enough attachments with those who died to be deeply affected by their loss. Really, it didn't mean much to me, then.

Then you hit that point where the light goes on and you realize "hey, this isn't forever." It's like any other major turning point in your life; it's scary. Until that time, you see all grown-ups as invincible; you can step on dad's foot as hard as you want, but you can't hurt him. He's so big and you're so small. Once death creeps into the picture, you realize that there is something that can hurt those big, powerful grown-ups. It comes crashing in on you hard, and at that age, you are cognizant enough to understand death and its finality, but not enough to understand that you will mature a great deal and be better equipped to accept such things when they happen later in life. It's traumatic, to say the least.

Oddly enough, following that revelation, it didn't take too long before I stopped viewing my own demise as a negative thing. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

My friend's son is 8 years old and recently begun asking lots of questions regarding death. He's suddenly afraid of some things that didn't bother him before as well. His sleep is disturbed and he gets nightmares about his parents dying. Nothing prompted his newly found fear. I think it's a stage kids go through at about this age.

I have explored different patterns of thought.. Death still scares me somewhat but I do not have panic attacks (not about death anyway). When you both theorize on your own and research philosophy.. I realised things are too complex for us to understand. During life there is constant re-birth. My 8 year old self is dead - i share characteristics with him but no more than I do with many other people. Just like in 15 years this vessel will still be living. But it will not be me within it. If we're constantly changing then why should i be scared of dying of old age when it won't actually be me. If i were placed in my 8 year old body I wouldn't even know how to act. We've all been alive for billions of year in the sense that we have been evolving for that long. I am a re-incarnation of my ancestor's from millenniums ago. But then I wonder, if I was not to have children, does that then me I really do die?

After crying at my parents for them to protect me from this I realised they couldn't. In fact they failed at protecting me from things they actually could have too. So I stopped going to them and just freaked out by myself in my room. I had a young and previously strong dog die of epilepsy (freaked me and my sister out). The dog became increasingly weak and leaked urine constantly as well, i'm not sure if that was side effects of meds. But that was probably around when these thoughts begun. And then my grandma got cancer... It was caught soo late. She wasn't alive for more than 2 months after that. That is the only time I've ever seen my dad cry to this day. I mean it was really ###$ up, it was back in a time before every couple in my family got divorced, we were all close. Then we were all invited to see her dead body in the casket and to this day she's the only dead person i've seen. But I'm 100% sure I had these fears before she became ill.

I was seeing a therapist but she was utter trash. Dismissive, un-professional, bitch and un-able to empathise. I tried to tell her that I'd been hurt my having parts of my penis cut off at the request of my mother. She proceeded to argue with me (retort lies), tell me i'm blaming it for my sexual problems even though I had never mentioned any other sexual problems to her! It really made me think she had personal reasons to argue, that is she had cut her son and could not accept some people are un-happy about having a harmful operation forced on them, but the therapy is supposed to be about me, not her. It really does hurt me to be dismissed by society, and she decided to hurt me too. Here is a quote from a cut man that I have read:

Two people touched my genitals when I was a child:
The man who gave me an orgasm went to jail for a very long time.
The man who tortured me with greater pain than I will ever experience and removed the best part of my penis went on to legally abuse hundreds more boys for a profit.

I also told my psych about previous side effects I've had with SSRI's and she dismissed and ignored that as well. It's like she was trying to protect the reputation of the drug as if it was her child. It was strange. I never said the drugs are horrible and shouldn't be given to people, I simply stated the real side effects I had had while previously taking them.
But I should have a new therapist soon.

I had asked this in the past. But never on a site like this. I guess now I know it is normal to feel this way when one first realises both concepts: Death and infinity.

I completely relate to this situation. I am now 25 years old and when I was around 7 or 8, I also had the death dilemma. I was the youngest in the famiy and my musings on death centred on that; I was utterly scared of being the last to die and left all alone. We had just moved to a different country at the time, so I did not have many friends on whom I could depend and other relatives were also scattered across two continents. When I started having this depression I felt like there waa no one I could turn to and even if I talked to them, they would never understand fully what I was feeling because they wouldbe dying before me and they wouldn't have to experience being well and completely alone.
In retrospect, I don't really think that I was scared of death, only because I could not comprehend it entirely. I was depressed and scared because I thought that I would be the last to die in my family; the thought of having to say goodbye to each of them and to live without them and without the certainty that there was an afterlife in which to be reunited with them, was what made me feel like life was completely pointless.
I don't know how I got over that particular situation (although it was helped along a bit, when my aunt saw me sobbing by myself and plonked me down in front of a Mr. Bean video to cheer me up. This only made me more depressed because Mr. Bean's life seemed so full of helplessness and trouble.)
I have always wondered about how it has shaped me as an individual and I always felt like it was an issue of mental health that was somehow resolved without professional intervention. I really am glad to see individuals with whom I can relate with in this situation.

I used to be very scared of dieing, I remember my mum bathing me and all of a sudden I cried saying "I don't want to die mum!!" she just told me to stop been silly I've got years left but I still think it's not going to be long, my years have been flying by, ano im only 21 but I also look further into things like getting old dieing and everything just been black and gone forever, just nothingness but I do think too far into everything :-/

-- Thu Aug 23, 2012 7:51 pm --

I used to be very scared of dieing, I remember my mum bathing me and all of a sudden I cried saying "I don't want to die mum!!" she just told me to stop been silly I've got years left but I still think it's not going to be long, my years have been flying by, ano im only 21 but I also look further into things like getting old dieing and everything just been black and gone forever, just nothingness but I do think too far into everything :-/

-- Thu Aug 23, 2012 7:57 pm --

I used to be very scared of dieing, I remember my mum bathing me and all of a sudden I cried saying "I don't want to die mum!!" she just told me to stop been silly I've got years left but I still think it's not going to be long, my years have been flying by, ano im only 21 but I also look further into things like getting old dieing and everything just been black and gone forever, just nothingness but I do think too far into everything :-/