Hidden Pain: Children Who Lost a Parent or Caregiver to COVID-19 and What the Nation Can Do to Help Them

Dan Treglia, J. J. Cutuli, Kamyar Arasteh, John Bridgeland, Gary Edson, Steven Phillips and Anjali Balakrishna

No jnr93, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has been the single deadliest acute public health crisis in American history, and these deaths are a salient threat to the functioning of family and social networks. We assess counts and rates of parental and other in-home caregiver loss using death data published by the CDC and household composition data available through the American Community Survey's Public Use Microdata Sample. We find that, through mid-November 2021, more than 167,000 children under the age of 18 lost a parent or other in-home caregiver to COVID-19. Most of these children are under the age of 13 and, though this experience is universal across racial and ethnic groups, ages, and states, racial and ethnic disparities in caregiver loss exceed already high disparities in COVID-19 deaths. We summarize literature on the impacts of parental loss and, after reviewing potential interventions for these children, offer recommendations to policymakers and practitioners.

Date: 2021-12-09
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:jnr93

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/jnr93

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