Dear Mary-anne: My teen is obsessed with death.

QUESTION:

I think my 14-year-old daughter thinks about death too much. She pores over news items about freak accidents and murders, and fixates on terror attacks.

Sometimes she pauses in the middle of normal activity, like shopping in a mall, to imagine what it would be like if there was a bomb or a gunman.

She admitted that she enters crowded spaces and immediately makes an escape plan. A big event like a plane crash or shooting overseas means she studies the victim's details in a morbid way.

We are at least 10 years older than her friend's parents and she worries that we'll die soon. She is unable to sleep in her own room at the moment.

ANSWER:

We're the only species alive that understands we'll die one day. It's a realisation that hits us all at different times and with varying amounts of concern.

Your daughter's obsession is not uncommon in young children or adolescence. But it can be more problematic at your daughter's age as the questions and imagined disasters become more complex.

If your daughter is having trouble sleeping in her own room then perhaps her anxiety is increasing.

It's good that she's able to talk to you and your best response is perhaps agree that yes, bad things can happen; yes, everyone dies eventually; yes, you have older parents.

Keep your replies pragmatic but hopeful; you are fit parents, your family history tends to lean towards longevity, the percentage of planes that crash is minimal etc.

TV viewing is obsolete for many teenagers as they watch the news alone, poring over computers. This increases the amount of post-disaster information your child can access and the minutiae she's gathering, will terrify her already over-worried brain. Can you monitor her viewing of news sites?

Perhaps too, you could come up with a settling down routine in the evening where you help distract her.

Could you read together or would your daughter listen to a talking book as she falls asleep? I realise that any book can have elements of death in the story but the pictures we form from stories are less alarming than the scenes we actually view on screens.

Other things you can do to help your daughter is have a worry time when you agree you'll talk about her concerns and then persuade her to put those concerns aside when the worry time is over.

Have agreed strategies that focus on other things in her life. There are plenty of ways you can access these mind-calming techniques and they'll be lifetime tools if your daughter learns about them now.

This situation may not be a quick fix and you might need outside help and therapy, but I think there's plenty you can do as a family to help your daughter in the first instance.