What Parents Can Learn from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Parents spend enormous energy protecting children from discomfort, which often extends to shielding them from any mention of death, even when a grandparent is aging or a family pet has died. Caitlin Doughty's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes describes growing up in a culture that handed death entirely to strangers, and argues that this habit of removal leaves people less prepared, not more protected, when loss eventually arrives. For parents, the book raises a practical question: whether constant avoidance actually protects children, or whether it just delays a harder reckoning later, while also leaving the parents themselves unprepared for decisions about their own aging parents or their own long-term planning.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The household trained to change the subject
Just as funeral culture moves a body out of view quickly, many households move any mention of death out of conversation quickly, a quick "they're in a better place" and on to the next thing. This can teach children that death is a subject too dangerous to discuss honestly, rather than a normal part of family life.
Parents assume silence protects children, when children often sense the avoidance and fill the gap with more frightening ideas of their own.
This week, answer one direct question your child asks about death or a grandparent's aging in plain, age-appropriate language instead of deflecting it.
Letting children witness age and loss honestly
Doughty argues that direct contact with death, rather than distance from it, produces steadier understanding. Involving children in visiting an aging grandparent, attending an appropriate part of a funeral, or simply talking through what happens when someone dies tends to build resilience rather than fear.
Parents keep children away from aging relatives or funerals entirely out of a wish to protect them, which can leave kids more anxious about the unknown than informed by the reality.
If a family visit to an aging relative is coming up, involve your child in a small, honest way, a card, a visit, a simple conversation about what is happening.
Care decisions are not automatically aligned with your family's wishes
Doughty shows how funeral homes and care institutions can steer decisions toward what is easiest for the institution rather than what a family actually wants. The same applies to hospitals and care facilities managing an aging parent, where default options are not always the most fitting choice for your family's values or budget.
Families accept the first plan offered by a hospital or care facility without asking what alternatives exist or what the family is actually allowed to choose.
Before your next care-planning conversation for an aging parent, write down three direct questions about options and ask them before agreeing to anything.
Memento mori as a family habit, not a burden
Doughty frames ongoing awareness of mortality, memento mori, as something that sharpens present-tense priorities rather than a dark preoccupation. For parents, that might mean occasionally naming, in age-appropriate ways, that time with children and aging relatives is finite, which tends to deepen attention rather than induce fear. A family comfortable naming mortality calmly tends to handle the eventual loss of a grandparent with more steadiness than one that has never spoken of it.
The instinct to shield children from discomfort can genuinely conflict with the book's case for honest proximity, since young children need real developmental boundaries, not full exposure to adult grief. The resolution is not choosing exposure over protection outright, but calibrating honesty to your child's age while still refusing to pretend death does not exist.
Name one thing, honestly
- What language do you currently use with your children about death, and does it feel honest or evasive? - Where have you postponed a real conversation about an aging parent's wishes? - What would change if your family treated mortality as ordinary rather than unspeakable?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Before your next care-planning conversation for an aging parent, write down three direct questions about options and ask them before agreeing to anything.