Burden from Sudden Parental Loss Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic: Thousands of Bereaved Children in Jeopardy
Many of you may come across a viral video of a 13 years old boy wearing a full PPE while performing adhan in front of his mother’s grave. His name is Arga, he lost his father two days after losing his mother, and now he has to live with three brothers, the oldest being 17 years old. Arga’s video reached the president, who then requested a personal video call and sent donations. However, Arga and his siblings are only a tiny part of the increasingly concerning number of children who lost their parents due to the pandemic.
On August 8th 2021, Indonesia’s Ministry of Health announced the number of deaths due to COVID-19 had reached a whopping hundred thousand. In addition, East Java’s Department of Women Empowerment, Children Protection, and Population (DP3AK) reported approximately 5 thousand children are orphaned in East Java with ages ranging from 0 to 18 years old. Save the Children Indonesia predicted that about 17 thousand children in Indonesia are becoming orphans. Along with it, several reports estimate the prevalence of child and adolescent mental illness observed globally in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic have significantly increased.
Here is the part where it gets concerning; with those alarming numbers, there is a common misconception of how general society views children as resilient beings and expecting children to bounce back from an adverse event, including trauma experienced in their early life.
As a universal experience, the loss of a loved one might constitute one of the most significant traumas in the person’s life. The death of a parent is an incredibly stressful event for a child, one that can have profound consequences for the child’s future wellbeing.
In his 2017 book, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Dr Bruce D. Perry, a renowned psychiatrist specialising in brain development and children in crisis, explained how the brain develops sequentially and rapidly in the early years of life. It is why young children are more susceptible to the long-term effects of trauma — because their brains are still developing. As children progress through each developmental stage, they will learn and master each step easier if their brains have built an efficient network of pathways. A repeating activation of children’s stress response from trauma at a young age, when the brain was still developing, may cause a cascade of altered receptors, sensitivity, and dysfunction throughout their brain. Our brain is trying to make sense of the world by looking for patterns; while experiences may alter and change how adults function, for a child, it provides the whole organising framework.
A recent study found that bereaved children had higher rates of depression than nonbereaved children, primarily for the first two years after a parent died. Children who lost a parent before the age of 12 were more depressed than those who lost a parent later in life. Moreover, bereaved children were also more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
So contrary to our conventional beliefs, time may not heal all wounds since humans may convert traumatic emotional experiences during childhood into organic disorders later in life.
The core of our development is the concept of ‘attachment’, which refers to the emotional relationships with other people. The nature of a child’s interactions, both before and after trauma, plays a crucial influence in moulding their response to it. Earlier studies have emphasised the central role of environmental factors in adjusting children’s outcomes, showing that these factors, rather than interpersonal factors, contribute to resilient adaptation after loss. Adaptation here is defined as a rearrangement of human and social environmental systems to permit the positive fulfilment of basic needs and development. When children had safe, familiar, and capable caretakers, they recovered more quickly. They showed no long-term detrimental consequences from the traumatic events.
Caring for bereaved children is more than ensuring that their daily needs and educational rights are met, although it is a fundamental step. These children need predictability, routine, a sense of control, and stable relationships with supportive people. Dr J. William Worden, one of the pioneers in grief research, did a two-year-long study to find out the impact of a parent’s death on children. In his book ‘Children and Grief’ he summarises ten things that children need following a bereavement, which includes:
1. Adequate and age-appropriate information; this needs to be readdressed when a new developmental stage is reached
2. Fears and anxieties addressed
3. Reassurance they are not to blame
4. Careful listening
5. Validation of individuals feelings
6. Help with overwhelming feelings
7. Involvement and inclusion
8. Continued routine activities
9. Modelled grief behaviours
10. Opportunities to remember
If you happen to be a kinship caregiver for a bereaved child, keep in mind that your ability to help children is roughly equal to how well you have been able to regulate and manage your feelings of loss. The impaired psychological function will lead to a decrease in the ability of caregivers, and increased depressive symptoms are risk factors for poor adaptations and psychological disorders.
Vice-chairman of the Indonesia Child Protection Commission (KPAI), Rita Prunawati, has highlighted the need for extended families to discuss and decide the children’s future before the government gets involved. As families are often scattered in different cities, it is vital for child protection services to build a system protecting these influxes of bereaved children amidst these unusual, fast-moving crises. A mechanism is needed to ensure that children receive the financial and other assistance they are entitled to. Beyond that, it is mandatory to develop a system that supervises children in any form of institutions and non-institutions. Psychosocial counselling such as the Sejiwa hotline (119 ext. 08) needs to be massively promoted and available for children who have lost one or both parents. But most importantly, caring for bereaved children should not be a charity case, as it is every child’s right to feel nurtured and protected.
