Parental and Caregiver Loss Due to COVID-19: Prevalence, Risk Factors, and Policy Implications

Background and Purpose: The nearly one million COVID-19 deaths in the United States include parents and others on whom children had relied for caregiving. These losses can be devastating for the development and long-term well-being of children, potentially leading to depression, symptoms of PTSD, substance abuse, lower educational attainment, and lower employment rates. There is therefore a policy imperative to address the mass caregiver loss we are seeing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We estimate the number of children who lost a parent or other co-residing caregiver to COVID-19 in the U.S. and identify racial, ethnic, and geographic disparities.

Methods: We accomplish this by creating a novel dataset that aligns COVID-19 death counts, disaggregated by race, ethnicity, age group, and state, that are available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with a representative sample of individuals and households. This allows us to calculate COVID-19 death rates for all individuals in the United States. We aggregate these rates within households to calculate the probability of a child losing a caregiver, facilitating the creation of measures of caregiver loss based on the demographic characteristics of the child.

Results: We estimate that 174,952 children lost a co-residing caregiver to COVID-19 through December 15, 2021. Of them, 77,283 lost a parent, seventy thousand lost a grandparent, and more than 13,500 children lost their only within-household caregiver. Racial and ethnic disparities in caregiver loss exceed disparities in COVID-19 deaths: Black and Hispanic children more than twice as likely to lose a caregiver than their White counterparts, and American Indian/Alaskan Native and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander children had caregiver loss rates between three and four times those of White children. Disparities are even higher in children losing their only caregiver, which creates an even more acute concern requiring attention from institutions. Half of all caregiver loss is concentrated in six states, though children lost caregivers in every U.S. state.

Conclusion and Implications: Caregiver deaths due to COVID-19 are a salient threat to the functioning of families and children, compounding additional challenges to physical and mental health and economic stability disproportionately imposed by the pandemic on historically disadvantaged populations. Policymakers and relevant systems should take steps to ensure affordable access to appropriate developmental, clinical, and financial support systems.