In the heart of Utah, a movement has taken root to address a silent crisis: childhood bereavement. When children lose a parent or caregiver, their whole world can collapse, with negative impacts on their emotional, educational and financial well-being. Some children will experience food insecurity, even homelessness. Mental health challenges — anxiety, depression, even attempted suicide — are far too common. Tragically, our systems to identify, connect and support the bereaved are inadequate to the task of helping the 6 million children in the United States who will experience this loss. Utah has made significant progress in fixing our systems and serves as a challenge that other states can, too.
Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, which nationally left 377,000 children who lost parents or caregivers from the disease, Utah got organized and created systems to ensure children who experience parental or caregiver loss for any reason can get the help they need. Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services now ensures that a checkbox is included on death certificates to indicate whether the decedent leaves behind any dependents. This simple option for voluntary disclosure enables us to identify bereaved children.
Similarly, Granite School District, which has more than 60,000 students, added a question to its back-to-school forms asking whether the enrolling student has experienced the loss of a parent or caregiver. These simple but transformative changes for voluntary disclosure have already identified more than 1,100 bereaved children and families in Utah. Identification is a key first step but must be followed by a system to help the bereaved navigate support resources.
For example, bereaved children and their families often qualify for Social Security death benefits, but studies indicate that only half are receiving such benefits, often because they never know to apply. That is why the work of the state of Utah, Children’s Collaborative for Healing and Support, and Social Security Administration to share data and improve systems is so vital.
But system changes must also directly reach the bereaved children and families. Each circumstance is different, requiring human-to-human interaction. That’s why an appropriation from the Utah state Legislature was so critical to support the partnership with the United Way of Salt Lake City, whose 211 system lays a good foundation for bereavement support.
Trained staff at United Way reach out to survivors identified through the death certificate checkbox and offer care navigation support to connect them to vital resources, such as Social Security benefits, bereavement support services, grief camps or deeper counseling. Granite School District can offer support from school counselors and refer bereaved students and families to the United Way care navigators to guide them to essential resources, ensuring that grief does not compound into lifelong hardship. The private sector can also play key roles, as the New York Life Foundation does in supporting the effort and advancing Grief-Sensitive Schools.
Because child bereavement from the loss of a parent or caregiver is a national problem affecting millions of children and in every state, change needs to occur everywhere and quickly.
That’s why we are working through the National Governors Association and the Children’s Collaborative to share the reforms and lessons from our work in Utah to other places for action, while recognizing that states and localities will shape their own responses based on local systems and capacities. Our framework is to ensure every state adopts policies and practices to identify bereaved children, connect families with resources and create community-based support systems. These steps are not only compassionate but also essential to mitigating the long term societal costs of childhood bereavement, including lost educational attainment and employment, mental health challenges, and financial instability.
Childhood bereavement is not just a private sorrow; it is a public challenge that demands collective action. We find governors, mayors and community leaders surprised to learn, as we did in Utah, that such systems are not already in place. Awareness must now translate into action so we can transform loss into resilience and grief into hope. Together, we can lead with compassion, do the hard work of reform and light the way for our nation’s bereaved children.