We are a nation in grief — and children are bearing the brunt of it. Just last week,19 children and two teachers were massacred by a teenage gunman at a Texas elementary school. Like thousands of parents across the country, I had to sit down with my own children over breakfast the next day and talk to them about this latest horrific event in a nation overflowing with tragedy.
For more than two years, we’ve struggled with how to protect our children from the incomprehensible tragedy of Covid-19. The pandemic has left more than 1 million people dead in the United States, including the parents and caregivers of upward of 200,000 children, 65 percent of whom are children of color.
The truth is, we can never fully protect our kids. But we can help them emerge whole from the worst the world puts in front of them. To do that effectively, far greater attention must be paid to the specific issue of childhood grief.
Childhood grief is a critical piece of the growing mental-health crisis facing youth, yet it is chronically overlooked by philanthropy — even by donors who invest in childhood development, mental health, racial equity, and related issues. Many philanthropists give generously to a range of mental-health issues, led most recently by Ballmer Group Philanthropy’s $425 million gift to fund childhood behavioral and mental-health research at the University of Oregon. But this gift, like many others, provides no explicit funding to address childhood grief.
This oversight ignores the data and the clear need. More than 5.6 million children in the United States, or nearly 8 percent, will experience the death of a sibling or parent before they turn 18. One in five will face the death of someone who played a significant role in their lives. And kids of color are far more likely to confront these challenges: 1 in 10 Black children will experience the death of a parent or sibling by age 18. Compared with their white peers, that rate is two times greater for the death of a father and three times greater for the death of a mother.
Public-Health Issue
Childhood grief is not just a personal tragedy. It is an urgent public-health issue — especially during the continuing Covid-19 pandemic and a gun-violence epidemic.
Research shows that bereaved children are at far greater risk for mental-health challenges, academic decline, substance misuse, teenage pregnancy, and suicide. They are 50 percent more likely to die by early adulthood. Profound loss in childhood can undermine a child’s future — or, with support, can lead to remarkable resilience.
But that support is often lacking. Federal and state policies for children and families fail to account for the effects of grief. For example, the Family and Medical Leave Act covers time off for births and adoptions, but not for those who are newly bereaved. Canada, China, and other countries require bereavement leave by law. The United Kingdom requires two weeks of paid leave for parents mourning a child’s death and helping siblings cope.
At the state level, those with the largest percentage of bereaved kids, including West Virginia, New Mexico, Kentucky, and Mississippi, are often the least likely to have adequate services to address their needs. This support can include housing and food assistance to make up for the income lost when a parent dies, mental-health support, and child-care options to help households headed by a single parent or grandparent. While many grieving children are eligible for Social Security insurance, fewer than half receive it.
Parents often don’t even recognize childhood grief as a significant problem. Nearly half of parents with children under 18 mistakenly believe that kids are less affected than adults by the death of a loved one, leaving kids to grieve alone without the support they need during the most challenging time in their young lives.
Build Into Mental-Health Grants
Philanthropy can help bring much greater awareness to the problem by explicitly incorporating bereavement into their broader strategies focused on mental health.
The Ballmer donation, for example, includes funding for a behavioral-health certificate program at the University of Oregon for midcareer professionals working in schools and other organizations and who are often ill equipped to address emotional barriers to learning. A program like this offers a tremendous untapped opportunity. Even before the pandemic, a study by the New York Life Foundation found that nearly 70 percent of teachers had at least one grieving student in their classroom, but only 7 percent had any kind of bereavement training. And grief and loss are not a required topic in most social-work or counseling programs.
Addressing grief by supporting the expansion of bereavement training programs would be a powerful way to advance philanthropic mental-health investments. Major donors in this area should consider adding it to their grant making. That includes Morgan Stanley, which gave $20 million to create the Alliance for Children’s Mental Health, and philanthropists such as Audrey Steele Burnand, who contributed $55 million for depression research to the University of California at Irvine.
We Know What Works
The good news is that we know what works for most kids, most of the time. Longstanding research shows the connection between adverse childhood experiences and the risk in adulthood of depression and other problems. But new evidence demonstrates that positive childhood experiences can be an especially effective antidote to challenges such as the death of a family member.
Learning how to navigate grief can reverberate into other areas of a child’s life as well. I’ve seen this at the national nonprofit I run — Experience Camps — which provides support to grieving children through no-cost camps and year-round programs. For example, 83 percent of those who have participated in our programs say they have used their grief skills to deal with the challenges of the pandemic. Those skills include learning to recognize, label, and talk about feelings, and deal with them through activities such as music, writing, and play. Ultimately, these kids develop a sense of power from knowing they are not alone in their grief and by connecting with others who understand their experiences.
But those of us who work in this area could do so much more if grant makers understood the need for our services and invested in them. The pandemic has left more parents and caregivers desperately seeking support and guidance for their grieving children. In response, Experience Camps expanded the number of openings in our programs by more than 40 percent this year. But our waiting list is still up more than 500 percent during the past five years, and funding has not kept pace. After an initial surge of support in the early days of the pandemic, donations are now down.
Part of the problem is that philanthropy doesn’t have clear ways to categorize and elevate childhood bereavement. Does the issue fall under youth development and programming? Mental health? Covid-19 response? Racial justice? Education? Childhood grief is of course part of all those issues — and many more.
Donors also need to recognize that this is about more than funding one program, one time. Children often re-experience grief through young adulthood and need the continuity of a supportive community throughout key developmental milestones. Peer-support programs can be especially important for kids and caregivers who feel adrift and alone after a loss. Groups such as the Dougy Center in Portland, Ore., and A Caring Hand in New York City offer these types of services, but they, too, have been inundated with children and families seeking grief support during the pandemic.
Those of us who have dedicated our lives to this work know firsthand that if more children could receive help, they could heal from trauma and even gain new strengths. Many, for instance, become especially empathetic leaders.
It’s clearer every day that our nation can no longer ignore the toll of grief on all of us — but most especially children. Grant makers and philanthropists who support children in multiple ways can ensure that bereavement emerges from the shadows and gets the attention it deserves.
