Grieving children: How many need our support?

More than 34,000 children in North Carolina have experienced the death of a parent since 2020

Katie here, bringing you this week’s updates in early care and education!

When I started working for EdNC in October 2021, I came in with a project. I’d just read a report that estimated the number of children who had experienced the death of a caregiver due to COVID-19, and I knew that schools would need to find ways to support them. I wanted to know how they were going to do that.

But when I started reaching out to schools, I learned that the vast majority of bereaved children weren’t grieving a COVID-19 death. Their caregivers had died of opioid, car crashes, gun violence, or other diseases.

A new report from Evermore, a national nonprofit organization advocating for support of bereaved children and families, backs this up.

Evermore’s researchers estimate that 34,581 children in North Carolina experienced the death of a parent since 2020. But deaths associated with COVID-19 only accounted for 2,575 of those children — less than 8%.

As policymakers consider strategies to support bereaved children, Joyal Mulheron, founder and executive director of Evermore, is worried they may focus solely on children whose parents were killed by COVID-19.

“By leaving homicide victims out of this, and leaving suicide and overdose out,” Mulheron told me, “we will be leaving so many incredibly vulnerable children behind.”

Read more about the challenges of counting bereaved children and the impacts of childhood bereavement.

Below, check out early childhood updates from the General Assembly (or technically a lack thereof), a deep dive into licensed child care data in majority-Black counties, and new research about the availability of crucial amenities in the neighborhoods where Black children live.