Shadows on the Crossroads: Childhood Bereavement as Exposure to Co-Resident Parental Death in the United States Increases, 1999-2023

Despite extensive focus on the rise in midlife mortality in the U.S. in recent years, the implications of this trend for children’s exposure to parental death—or bereavement—remain minimally explored. In this study, we introduce a new approach to estimate trends in children’s exposure to co-resident parental death in the U.S over the past 25 years (1999-2023). Our methodological approach relies on a fusion model and data simulation that joins recent population and mortality data to estimate children’s exposure to co-resident parental death. The results reveal a subtle rise in parental death each year since the early 2010s: in 2023 alone, more than 300,000 children experienced a co-resident parent’s death. The results further demonstrate that the long-running, steady increase in the annual number of parentally bereaved children accumulates to more than 2.4 million children under 18 in 2023 having ever experienced a parent’s death—representing approximately 3.2% of the child population. The results further demonstrate race and ethnic disparities, with non-Hispanic Indigenous children especially at risk of parental death. Together, the results attest to the need for a comprehensive policy response to support parentally bereaved children, and the need for further scholarly recognition of this uniquely consequential childhood adversity.