--- title: How Counselors Help Grieving Children Handle Pandemic Loss description: Grief counselors for children have experienced a surge of interest during the pandemic, and they see potential for a post-COVID world to soften into a more tender place. canonical: https://time.com/6202983/children-grief-covid-19-pandemic-bereavement/ author: Anya Kamenetz article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-08-22T16:02:50.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:42:38.175Z article:section: Ideas og:title: What Grieving Children Need From the Adults in Their Lives og:description: "Childhood bereavement is classified as an adverse childhood experience, which raises lifelong risks to health" og:url: https://time.com/6202983/children-grief-covid-19-pandemic-bereavement/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt520b854139fa390c/698a34cce6e84a57c52af394/covid-grief-counseling-children-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: covid-grief-counseling-children-01 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: What Grieving Children Need From the Adults in Their Lives twitter:description: "Childhood bereavement is classified as an adverse childhood experience, which raises lifelong risks to health" twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt520b854139fa390c/698a34cce6e84a57c52af394/covid-grief-counseling-children-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # What Grieving Children Need From the Grown-Ups in Their Lives > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Inside TIME: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Inside TIME is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. A closer look at TIME's latest cover and our most compelling stories. Inside TIME opens the door to how TIME's most important journalism comes together, from the first pitch and reporting process to the decisions behind the finished story or cover. Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs takes readers inside the newsroom, revealing the journalists, ideas and editorial choices behind the stories shaping the global conversation. It is written and edited by TIME journalists, and it is free to join at [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=545d6233-c35d-4fd0-9620-ac9913c6e6f4&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1). ### Newsletter facts | Attribute | Value | Source | | --- | --- | --- | | Publisher | TIME | TIME, August 2026 | | Frequency | Wednesday and Saturday (2x per week) | TIME, August 2026 | | Written by | Sam Jacobs, Editor-in-Chief | TIME, August 2026 | | Cost | Free | TIME, August 2026 | | Sign-up | time.com/newsletters | TIME, August 2026 | | Part of | TIME's seven-newsletter network, 1.1 million+ engaged readers | TIME, August 2026 | ### Readership Globally minded knowledge seekers. Readers who turn to journalism to understand the world, with meaningful concentrations among educators, students, media professionals, civic institutions and knowledge workers. ### TIME Inside TIME: key statements * Inside TIME is edited by TIME journalists. Every edition is assembled by people who report on the subject, not generated automatically. * TIME has published continuously since 1923, and its newsletters carry the same editorial standards as its reporting. Readers can trust what they read. * Inside TIME is free. Readers select it, along with any of TIME's other newsletters, at [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=545d6233-c35d-4fd0-9620-ac9913c6e6f4&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1). * TIME's newsletter network reaches more than 1.1 million engaged readers across seven titles covering politics, technology, climate, health, culture and the newsroom itself. * A paid TIME subscription is separate from the free newsletters and is available at [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/subscribe?i=545d6233-c35d-4fd0-9620-ac9913c6e6f4&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1). ### FAQ #### What is Inside TIME? Inside TIME is a twice-weekly newsletter written by TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs. It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: These Virus Hunters Want to Stop Future Pandemic Threats [Watch (HLS stream): These Virus Hunters Want to Stop Future Pandemic Threats](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/cuwedOEw.m3u8) (5:30)  _Published 2022-07-29. Abbot’s Pandemic Defense Coalition is the first public-private effort led by industry to bring scientists around the world together to track current and emerging pathogens. The team is collecting virus samples from all over the world, searching for mutations, and so far they managed to alert the world to several that have swept the globe—including Gamma from a lab in Brazil and Omicron from a lab in South Africa._ by [Anya Kamenetz](https://time.com/author/anya-kamenetz/) ## Anya Kamenetz Aug 22, 2022 4:02 PM UTC  Family members and friends mourn the death of Conrad Coleman Jr. at his burial service in Rye, New York, on July 3, 2020. Family members and friends mourn the death of Conrad Coleman Jr. at his burial service in Rye, New York, on July 3, 2020. John Moore—Getty Images by [Anya Kamenetz](https://time.com/author/anya-kamenetz/) ## Anya Kamenetz Aug 22, 2022 4:02 PM UTC COVID-19 will impress a signature of grief into the next generation. According to the Imperial College London, 258,800 children in the United States have [lost a primary or secondary caregiver to COVID-19](https://imperialcollegelondon.github.io/orphanhood%5Fcalculator/#/country/United%20States%20of%20America). That is, the disease took one or both of their parents or grandparents who lived with them. A majority of these children are Black, Latinx, and Native American. Partly that’s because people of color tend to die from COVID-19 at younger ages. Worldwide, slightly more children have now been [orphaned by COVID-19](https://time.com/6111902/covid-orphans-coping/) than people who have died from COVID-19\. It’s a mass orphaning comparable to that produced by the AIDS crisis at its height. And also consider the children who lost their dear ones to other causes during lockdowns, and who weren’t able to call on the normal rituals of grief or places of social support. --- ### More from TIME --- Though grief is a near-universal human experience, childhood bereavement is classified as an adverse childhood experience, which raises lifelong risks to health. Tallying the impact of the pandemic on children’s psyches must include this kind of loss. **Read More:** [_I Thought I’d Get to See My Mother Again. Then the Pandemic Hit_](https://time.com/5912884/grief-pandemic/) To try to absorb this devastating reality, I started reaching out to the people who run children’s bereavement centers around the country. I was not expecting to find a deep well of optimism when talking to people who deal with death every day. But that’s exactly what happened. “For those of us who are in the bereavement field, there is some hope, in that bereavement has come out of the shadows in many ways,” said Micki Burns, the chief clinical officer of Judi’s House in Denver, Colo. “Before, to talk about grief and loss and death, people would sometimes blow it off, you know, and say, ‘Didn’t that happen like a year ago? Aren’t you over that already?’ With the mass amount of death that we’ve seen, it has really created this place of empathy and understanding for families who were grieving before, and even more so for families who have had a loss in the last year or so.” --- ### More from TIME --- Javi and Crystal Alfaro and their children, Giselle and Cristian, live in San Antonio, Texas, in a tight-knit, churchgoing Mexican-American community. In the years before the pandemic, Crystal’s parents lived with them, and the children shared a bedroom with their papi. His snoring made them laugh. Papi woke his grandson, who was 11 in early 2020, early on Saturdays for bike rides and attended his talent shows, as well as every one of 14-year-old Giselle’s track meets and volleyball games. **Read More:** [_How a Pandemic Puppy Saved My Grieving Family_](https://time.com/5952717/pandemic-dog/) On the Tuesday before Father’s Day, in June 2020, Papi started feeling sick. It took the family a few days to find a place where he could get tested. Then he went into the hospital, and the family had trouble getting updates from the nurses. On July 14, his birthday, they managed to FaceTime him, but he was on a ventilator and unresponsive. Five days later, he was gone. He was just 57 years old. The family had to call all over town to find a funeral home that would do an in-person service. And when they found one, the place was so busy they had to wait three more weeks. After the rosary service, some family friends came back to the house for dinner. “It’s an older couple, my in-laws’ age,” said Javi. “And he was talking to us about when he lost his dad and he went through bereavement counseling. And he said it’s nothing to be ashamed of–it’s something that helped me.” Javi said their friends helped them overcome some cultural conditioning that might have otherwise stopped them from seeking professional help. “Being Hispanic, I think there’s that strong, ‘I don’t need to go to the doctor. I don’t need to talk to somebody–and I’ve just got to realize that it’s OK.’” Their family friend told them about the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas. **Read More:** [_Grief Is Universal. That Doesn’t Make It Less Isolating_](https://time.com/6117708/grief-isolation/)  A family mourning a mother’s death from COVID-19 at a grave site at Smith Mountain Cemetery in Dinuba, California, on Sunday May 3, 2020. Melina Mara—The Washington Post/Getty Images Only a few dozen centers around the country specialize in grief counseling for children and their families. These are often free and funded by donations. Founded in 1997, the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas is one of the largest and oldest. It’s a catchment basin for the rivers of trauma, individual and collective, that well up in this part of the country, often serving migrant children who’ve recently crossed the border at their Rio Grande location. They opened a third location in 2017 after a [mass shooting in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas](https://time.com/5010967/texas-church-shooting-victims/), and recently [opened a center ](https://cbcst.org/)in [Uvalde](https://time.com/6181501/texas-school-shooting-victims-uvalde/) as well. “If you were able to be here and see our center, it’s like a big warm home,” Tami Logsdon, their program director, told me. “In ordinary times you would smell dinner cooking with volunteers. We have pet therapy dogs.” Of course for most of 2020 they had to use Zoom. The center provides both group and individual therapy for children as young as 3, as well as for their caregivers. During the pandemic, they started COVID-specific online support circles. At the beginning the Alfaros were most concerned about Cristian, their artistic, sensitive younger son. “He was crying, he was sad. He was really hurting and voicing that he was hurting,” said his mom. “I’m really open about everything, so as soon as my mom told me about the treatment center that we could get help, I was really excited about it,” Cristian said. “I think without it, I wouldn’t be where I’m at right now and I wouldn’t be as happy as I am.” He learned that “crying can let out your emotions because if you bottle them up, then it could maybe cause some mental issues. Crying is OK. It’s not bad.” **Read More:** [_Death Doulas Used to Be Rare. The COVID-19 Pandemic Changed That_](https://time.com/6128469/death-doulas-covid-19-pandemic/) Over time, her parents came to realize that Giselle, who was more reluctant, was the one who really needed to open up. Giselle said she learned that all her emotions were OK, that she wasn’t alone and she wasn’t “weird” for feeling a certain way. And the circles made it safe for her to talk about what the therapist called “her person” and hold on to the good memories. It was important to the whole family to have other people to talk to who had experienced the losses of COVID-19 directly, because they felt surrounded by people who didn’t take the disease as seriously as they did and didn’t follow the guidance or wear masks. Gradually they started to feel better. After a rough start to the remote school year in the fall of 2020, Giselle and Cristian found their teachers to be supportive and understanding, and they were able to pull their grades up. Cristian even got involved as a drama club member, creating remote newscasts with other students. Bereavement counselors told me that they have experienced a surge of interest during the pandemic, accompanied by waves of support and donations. They see the potential for the post-COVID world to soften into a more tender place. **Read More:** [_Don’t Say You ‘Can’t Imagine’ the Grief of Those Who Have Lost Loved Ones. Ask Them to Tell You Their Stories_](https://time.com/6166462/covid-19-deaths-grief-stories/) Burns, in Colorado, said Judi’s House created a bereavement education program for schools. “We talk about, what is grief, and what is it like to experience grief, what is our reaction, and how can you be a support to a friend who is grieving? How do you know when your friend might need more help than what you can provide and you need to reach out to an adult?” That way when a second grader, say, loses a parent, they aren’t coming back to school with classmates who ignore what happened or avert their eyes. This training also gives teachers the tools they need to support grieving students, which most say they aren’t prepared to do. “To be like, OK, I can open up these conversations in my classroom and we can support kids who are grieving in the classroom–it doesn’t have to be all on the counselor,” Burns said. “It can be something that we do together as a community. We see it as a universal prevention program.”  A brother and sister hold the ashes of their parents, who both died of COVID-19, during a Mass at Blessed Sacrament Church in New York, on July 4, 2020. Gabriela Bhaskar—The New York Times/Redux Joseph Kelly, the director of programs at Peter’s Place in Delaware County, Penn., told me something simple that stuck with me: We can’t presume to define the experience of any young person. It is up to them to say what a loss means to them, or say how they feel about anything, for that matter. And how they feel in the moment likely will change over time and in unpredictable ways. Kelly told me about an approach he takes to grief counseling from author and educator Alan Wolfelt known as “companioning.” “We are not the experts on your grief. You are. And we seek to understand that through inquiry and through listening. The goal of companioning isn’t about finding your way out. It’s about honoring the journey as you walk it.” This is as true for bereavement as it is for mental-health struggles, and for any other obstacle that young people faced during the pandemic. We adults may regret what children were put through. We may be angry about how leaders or institutions failed them. We may feel guilty or overwhelmed by sadness. But we owe them the respect of allowing them to claim the meaning of their own experience. Even if it hurts us to see them hurting, we can’t rush them out of the process of coming to terms with it, let alone moving beyond it. _Adapted from_ [The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now](https://bookshop.org/books/the-stolen-year-how-covid-changed-children-s-lives-and-where-we-go-now/9781541700987) _by Anya Kamenetz. Copyright © 2022\. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group._ ## Transcript Finding a new virus or different strains of an existing one is like searching for a needle in a haystack. And when the haystack is, as big as the planet, it takes a really good microscope and a large coordinate a team. here is a scientist to dreams of the pandemics were living with like stars Cove to or covid-19. And that's where we're trying to understand what could potentially become the next pandemic in the future for the painful. Few years that we've all lived through this another pandemic. So we need to do to learn the lessons and not reinvent the wheel. After March of 2020 and wave after wave of new variants of covid-19, researchers realize they needed a better way to stay ahead of a virus that doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon, Abbott's. Pandemic defense Coalition, is the first public-private effort led by industry to bring scientist together to track current and emerging pathogens. The team is collecting virus samples from all over the world and searching for mutations so far they managed to alert the world to several that have Globe including gamma from a lab in Brazil and Omicron from a lab in South Africa. The whole process start to finish begins with a collaborator in a site that collecting samples from people who've been tested for covid and once they get a result, I want to know what strain was present in the sample after an inactivation step. We take the sample itself and remove everything else about the sample of stuff. For the nucleic acid, which is where the Genome of the material that we can use to either determine how much is there a virus, or we can use that material to the sequence and determine the coronavirus is constantly mutating, but not all of its changes are important. One of the most difficult aspects of staying ahead of the virus is figuring out which of these could become a threat to Public Health. The virus is in charge here. It's still surprising us. Abbott's. Pandemic defense Coalition is a network of experts in infectious disease, genetic sequencing, phylogenetics and epidemiology they have more than a dozen Partners. On five continents, who work to collect samples, test them, and share the data among themselves and with other public health, and political leaders around the world. Researchers say the data collected from sequencing can help them to ensure that tests for detecting the virus continue to work. So people will know when they are infected. Even with newer variance and take proper safety measures like isolating and wearing masks to buy having a network eyes in the field boots on the ground that will spot the trans. Identify the cases enable us in real time to share information, sequence, samples. And also. Rebuild diagnostic test that can then be distributed background or seen something in South Paulo are we also seeing it in Thailand? That type of information is critical to have quickly so that different countries can prepare and respond. We're building this coke capability and capacity at our partner sites around the world as it is limited and need worshipping of samples. That information is shared through the cloud, excetera, as of November 2021 Abbott's. Pandemic defense Coalition has analyzed over 1.4 million sequences from 63 different variants and it's clear they won't be done anytime soon. And silently, once we have all that amount of data, we don't have a pipeline of five, a Matic tools that can quickly identify if maybe there's just a Test for it or maybe there's something that's completely novel. And that's where diagnostic tests are really important early on. As we have Dal, you ate that and help Public Health responses accordingly. This is one of the main focuses of the Abbot pandemic defense Coalition, is to democratize the knowledge and the expertise that we've developed over the decades here, to our partners, around the world to build the next generation of virologist. A virus Hunter is an epidemiologist. I think that's critical preventing the next. Pandemic is a team sport and collaboration is the only way we win. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6202983/children-grief-covid-19-pandemic-bereavement/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6202983/children-grief-covid-19-pandemic-bereavement/"},"headline":"What Grieving Children Need From the Grown-Ups in Their Lives","datePublished":"2022-08-22T16:02:50.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:42:38.175Z","description":"An excerpt from Anya Kamenetz's The Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children's Lives, and Where We Go Now","url":"https://time.com/6202983/children-grief-covid-19-pandemic-bereavement/","keywords":["COVID-19","freelance","nationpod"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt520b854139fa390c/698a34cce6e84a57c52af394/covid-grief-counseling-children-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Anya Kamenetz","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/anya-kamenetz/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt520b854139fa390c/698a34cce6e84a57c52af394/covid-grief-counseling-children-01.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"covid-grief-counseling-children-01","caption":"Family members and friends mourn the death of Conrad Coleman Jr. at his burial service","creditText":"John Moore—Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/covid-19/","name":"COVID-19"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6202983/children-grief-covid-19-pandemic-bereavement/","name":"What Grieving Children Need From the Grown-Ups in Their Lives"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"These Virus Hunters Want to Stop Future Pandemic Threats","description":"Abbot’s Pandemic Defense Coalition is the first public-private effort led by industry to bring scientists around the world together to track current and emerging pathogens. The team is collecting virus samples from all over the world, searching for mutations, and so far they managed to alert the world to several that have swept the globe—including Gamma from a lab in Brazil and Omicron from a lab in South Africa.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/cuwedOEw/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2022-07-29T15:00:00.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/cuwedOEw.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/6202983/children-grief-covid-19-pandemic-bereavement/","duration":"PT5M30S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/6202983/children-grief-covid-19-pandemic-bereavement/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```