Former Gov. Deval Patrick calls on Biden to support kids who lost parents to COVID-19

Jennifer Wiles has met a lot of children who have lost a parent to COVID-19.

"I know a little girl who is eight years old, whose mother was diagnosed with COVID, and she had a really rapid decline," said Wiles, the director of children's services for the hospice and palliative care program at Beth Israel Lahey Health.

Like many who have lost a loved one in this pandemic, the girl wasn't able to say goodbye in person. She just had an iPad with a poor connection.

"Not a final hug. Not a final holding of the hand. Just on the iPad," she said.

A new report released last week by the COVID Collaborative, a national advisory group on the pandemic co-chaired by former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, found that more than 167,000 children in the United States have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19. That's one out of every 450 kids. The report says that includes more than 2,000 kids in Massachusetts.

Patrick and his coalition are calling on President Joe Biden to lead a coordinated effort to identify the children who need support and meet the wide range of social and emotional needs they face.

"When it comes to children, focusing on meeting their needs and doing so promptly, we think, is critical," Patrick told GBH News.

Those needs include counseling, and in some cases, intense therapy, Patrick said.

"Many need very basic services around health and housing and food," he said. "These are children, 70 percent of them 13 years old or younger, and they don't know how to advocate for themselves. And they don't always have adults who can do so for them."

Knowing what kind of help is available and how to access it is complicated, Patrick said. A program led by the White House could help make those connections, by screening to identify kids who have lost a parent at doctors’ appointments, creating school-based interventions to support them where they are and strengthening existing social services.

The report's recommendations include the creation of a unified fund to address those needs, particularly for the 13,000 children who lost their only caregiver, that would go to financial assistance and mental health support.

"That was the case after the [Boston] Marathon bombing," Patrick said. "Having one central place where resources were pooled and where decisions could be made quickly, I think was incredibly important. To do that at scale is hard, but possible. In many cases, we have the necessary resources and we just don't have the necessary coordination."

Among those resources that could benefit from additional funding are two programs Wiles directs. Camp Erin Boston is an annual weekend-long bereavement camp for kids, and HEARTplay offers a range of bereavement programs year-round. The programs support children by giving them the tools they need to express and process the various emotions that come with grief.

A national program like the one the COVID Collaborative is calling for is needed, Wiles said, especially since her programs are offered at no cost to families.

"And that is imperative," she said of the free programming. "We just absolutely need support to be able to run the programs."

The programs she directs help provide grieving children with coping skills in several ways. The first part, she said, focuses on remembering and honoring the person who has died.

"That's important, to keep saying their name, to keep talking about memories and different experiences that they have had with this person," she said. "The second part is to realize that no one is alone in grief. And that is part of our mission, too, that no young person should have to grieve alone. With peer support models, with the camp, with all of our programs, people have the opportunity to see that there are other people who have experienced something similar to them."

The kids are also armed with information about what grief is, the emotions that it can cause, and how to express those emotions, "so that kids can draw within themselves their own strengths to cope with with grief," she said. "And I think in doing so, we really promote resiliency and hope. We really confirm the courage, the kindness, the compassion that is within all of them to cope."