The Psychology of My Girl: Childhood Grief and the First Encounter With Death

The Child Who Grew Up Among the Dead

Vada's situation, growing up in a funeral home surrounded by the business of death, is unusual, but it dramatizes a broader question: how do children make sense of death, and how does their environment shape that sense-making. Vada has been exposed to death continuously, in a way most children are protected from. Yet this continuous exposure has not produced comfort. It has produced a specific anxiety, a preoccupation that suggests she has been exposed to death without being given the framework to process what the exposure means. Research on children's understanding of death finds that the capacity to comprehend death develops gradually across childhood, and that the development depends substantially on the support adults provide. It is supported when adults engage honestly with children's questions, offering age-appropriate information and emotional support. It is impaired when children are exposed to death without that support. Exposure to death does not, by itself, produce healthy understanding. The exposure must be accompanied by emotional support and a framework for what death means, or it can produce anxiety rather than understanding.

Health Anxiety and the Fears That Stand for Other Fears

Vada's conviction that she suffers from various illnesses is presented with humor but reflects a real psychological phenomenon. Health anxiety, the preoccupation with the fear of illness, often serves as a vehicle for anxieties that are not really about health at all. Beneath the specific health fears, a person is often anxious about mortality more broadly, about loss, about vulnerability, about the fragility of life. By worrying about a specific illness, the diffuse fear is given a concrete focus that feels more manageable than the underlying fear it represents. In this light, Vada's health anxiety can be understood as a vehicle for the deeper anxieties her situation has produced. She has lost her mother, she lives surrounded by death, and she has not been given the support to process these realities. The health anxiety is not really about health. It is about the death and loss that surround her. Tellingly, after Thomas J.'s death, when Vada experiences genuine grief and begins to process the losses she carries, her preoccupation with illness is no longer foregrounded. When the underlying anxieties that health fears represent find more direct expression, the health fears often recede, no longer needed as their vehicle.

The Guilt of the Child Who Survived

Vada carries a specific and largely unspoken burden related to her mother's death. Her mother died shortly after giving birth to her, and Vada has absorbed, in the way children often do, a sense of responsibility for this death. In her understanding, however inaccurate, her birth caused her mother's death. This guilt is rarely spoken directly, but it underlies much of her psychology, contributing to her sense that she is somehow connected to mortality in a way that makes her culpable. Children are prone to a kind of magical thinking in which they understand themselves as causally responsible for events they did not in fact cause. The child whose parent dies may believe themselves somehow responsible, through their behavior, their wishes, or in Vada's case their birth. This belief, though factually inaccurate, can be emotionally powerful, installing a guilt that shapes the child in lasting ways. What addressing it requires is direct engagement: the child needs to be told clearly that they did not cause the death, and to receive the emotional support that allows the guilt to be processed and released. The guilt cannot simply be reasoned away, but it can be met through direct reassurance and emotional engagement.

Thomas J. and the First Real Death

The film's central event, the death of Vada's best friend Thomas J., transforms her relationship to death from anxious preoccupation to genuine grief. It is her first encounter with the death of someone she loves, her first experience of grief as distinct from the anxious preoccupation that had defined her. The death forces her to confront mortality not as an abstraction to be anxiously anticipated but as a concrete reality that has taken someone she loved. Her grief is rendered with attention to how children grieve, which differs in important ways from how adults grieve. Children's grief is often intermittent, alternating between intense distress and apparently normal functioning in a way adults may find confusing. Children may not have the words to express grief directly, expressing it instead through behavior, through play, through concrete and literal statements. Vada's grief takes exactly this childlike form, given shape through a specific concrete detail that stands for the larger reality she cannot yet fully grasp. The encounter is different from anything anticipatory anxiety could prepare for, because the genuine loss of a loved one is qualitatively different from the abstract fear of death. The transformation is devastating, but it is also, in a painful way, a kind of maturation, a movement toward the genuine emotional engagement that real loss requires.

The Father Who Could Not Speak of Feeling

Vada's father, Harry, contributes to her difficulties through his own emotional avoidance. He is a kind man, but he is unable to engage emotionally with Vada, unable to speak of her mother, unable to provide the support her situation requires. His work as a funeral director involves managing death at a professional distance, and that distance extends into his personal life, where he handles the practical aspects of raising Vada while keeping emotional engagement at arm's length. This pattern is common in those who have suffered significant loss and who manage it through distance rather than engagement. Harry lost his wife, and his way of managing that loss has been to avoid engaging with it, which leaves Vada without the support she needs and models an avoidant relationship to grief that contributes to her own difficulties. The parent who cannot engage with their own grief is often unable to support their child's. As the film progresses, Harry begins, haltingly, to engage more emotionally with Vada. The movement is incomplete and tentative, but it represents the beginning of the support she has lacked, illustrating how a parent's movement toward engagement can begin to provide what a child's grieving requires.

Reflections for the Viewer

My Girl has kept its audience across the decades, remembered for the emotional power of Thomas J.'s death and Vada's grief. For viewers who experienced significant loss in their own childhoods, the film may carry particular resonance and particular difficulty. The grief of childhood, particularly grief that went unsupported, often remains incompletely processed into adulthood, available to be engaged with and worked through even long after the losses occurred. For viewers supporting a grieving child, whether as a parent, relative, or other caring adult, the film offers an implicit guide through the contrast between the support Vada needs and the avoidance her father initially provides. Children's grief requires direct engagement, honest age-appropriate information about death, emotional support that allows the grief to be expressed, and, where guilt is present, direct reassurance that the child did not cause the death. The child who is grieving needs the adults around them to engage rather than to avoid, to speak of the loss rather than to keep a protective silence. In the end, My Girl is not simply a nostalgic story with a famously sad death at its center. It is an honest engagement with a child's experience of death, and a quiet argument that the healthy navigation of grief requires not the avoidance of mortality but the emotional engagement and support that allow loss to be grieved rather than merely feared.

If this theme resonates, you may also find it useful to read about how to teach emotional regulation and building confidence in children, both of which touch on supporting a child through difficult feelings.

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