@memester,
people are going to be afraid of death whether they're religious or not (although, it sure doesn't help when some religious leaders tell people they're probably going to hell when they die). What a child needs to try to understand whether they're religious or not is that death is by no means an end, but a transition. If it's religious, then they're soul will pass on to the afterlife, which can still be scary depending on how strong you are in your theology. If it's not, then their matter and energy will return to the earth, and eventually to the cosmos, recycled in a dynamic process in which matter and energy is never lost, only converted. Of course then you'll have to deal with what happens to the consciousness and the ego when you die, which will be either very easy or very difficult, depending on how perceptive and adept your child is.
Both realities put me at ease when I think about dying. I gotta go with an aphorism from John Dunne who said when we die, the records in the archives of our lives are not erased or destroyed, but translated into a better language.