KONCEPT SMRTI U DĔTÍ: KOMPONENTY A DETERMINANTY.

Understanding of children's death concept increases its significance in a situation of serious illness of a child or in facing a loss of a close person. Our study describes the development of child's understanding of death from four different historical perspectives - psychoanalytic, cognitive, existential, naive-biological perspective. It points out primary components of the death-concept and variables that can modify its individual development such as age, cognitive development, personal experience of a child, religiousness of a family, anxiety of a child and parents and the communication about the topic in a family. The study summarizes risk arising from different understanding of death by children and adults, indicates decreasing age of construing matured death concept by children, discusses discrepancies of provided studies and suggests further research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]