Depictions of Visual Metaphor of Death and Grief in Children’s Picture Books

Grief and death are something everyone including children have to face at one point and providing young children ways to process that grief is incredibly important. Picture books especially have covered this topic numerous times, though whether they do it in a way children can process is the question. The focus of this study is to analyze the type of visual metaphors that appear in picture books and note how many of them use the word death in the story. This is accomplished through conducting a content analysis and noting which visual metaphors appear in the context of death and grief over the course of 15 books. The amount of books that used language such as “death,” “dead,” or “dying” was also noted. The results of this study shows a variety of visual metaphors used to convey death and grief, particularly in books that do not use death language of which there are only five in the sample.