Waiting for Help: No Country Measures How Long Bereaved Children Wait

Nobody knows how long bereaved children wait for support. We found no country that publishes waiting times for children’s bereavement services, and no study that has measured them. What can be seen points one way: some services build in a wait of several weeks after a death, some say their waiting lists run to months, and organisations report more demand than they can meet.

When a child’s mum or dad dies, the family may look for help within days, or only months later when school, sleep or friendships start to go wrong. Either way, the next question is often how long it will be before someone can see them. A wait that seems short to a service can feel long to a child for whom a term, or a birthday, or the first anniversary is coming. This study gathers what is known about those waits worldwide: what services say about their own policies and waiting lists, what bereaved people and practitioners report, and, as context only, the waiting-time figures that do exist for children’s mental health services, which are not the same thing.

No country counts how long bereaved children wait

Many health systems publish how long people wait for treatment. For children whose parent has died, there is nothing comparable. We searched national statistics, the reports of national childhood bereavement networks and the research literature, and found no published figure, for any country, on how long bereaved children wait between asking for help and receiving it.

Part of the reason is structural. Much specialist support for bereaved children, including every service cited below, is provided by charities, hospices and community organisations rather than by health services, so it sits outside the systems that collect waiting-time data. Where a national survey of the sector does exist, it tends to ask about demand, funding and staffing rather than waits. The 2025 survey of 424 childhood bereavement professionals in the United States by the National Alliance for Children’s Grief, for example, asks about all three; its published report does not mention waiting lists at all^[4].

Health-service data do not fill the gap either. England’s detailed annual figures on children’s mental health services, compiled by the Children’s Commissioner, report waits by age, gender, ethnicity and deprivation, but not by whether a child has been bereaved^[5]. A search of the Europe PMC research database for studies that pair waiting lists or waiting times with bereaved children or young people returned five records, none of which measured how long bereaved children wait for support.

So the honest headline is a gap. The rest of this study sets out the indirect evidence, which is all from the UK, Ireland, the US and Canada, and says plainly where each piece comes from. For the wider picture of who receives support at all, see our study on access to bereavement support.

Two kinds of wait: one set by policy, one set by capacity

Families can meet two different waits, and it helps to keep them apart.

The first is a wait that services build in on purpose. Some services for bereaved children do not begin structured support until a set time after the death. One English hospice states that its bereavement support for children “can begin from six weeks after the death”^[2]. Another states that referrals to its children’s service “are accepted from six weeks after the death”, though a consultation call may be offered before then^[3]. In a UK national survey of adults bereaved during the pandemic, some respondents described services that required them to wait a minimum period after the death, of between six weeks and six months, before they could be seen^[1]. These are examples, not a count: we found no survey of how many services set such a threshold, in any country.

The service pages we read do not explain their thresholds. Grief is a normal response, and not every bereaved child needs specialist help; many come through with the support of family, friends and school. Whether a fixed wait serves the children who do need more is a separate question, and the evidence on it is limited. A 2007 meta-analysis of 13 controlled studies of bereavement interventions for children found that, on average, they did not produce the benefits seen for other psychological therapies, but that studies which intervened in a time-sensitive manner, and those which selected children using specific criteria, had better results^[6]. The evidence is old and thin, and it does not settle what the right timing is. Our study of what helps bereaved children looks at the intervention research in more detail.

The second wait is the one that follows when a service cannot offer a place straight away. The hospice that accepts referrals from six weeks also says it is “experiencing a high level of demand”, that its waiting lists are “longer than usual”, and that “this may mean we take a few months to offer you support”^[3]. For a family, the two waits add up.

When bereaved people and practitioners are asked, waiting lists come up

The nearest thing to systematic evidence comes from surveys that asked bereaved people, or the people supporting them, about barriers to help. None measured waits in days or weeks, and none was limited to bereaved children.

One is a UK national online survey of 711 adults bereaved between March and December 2020, open from late August 2020 to early January 2021 and recruited through media, social media and voluntary organisations^[1]. Of the 41% who had tried to get support from bereavement services, 56% experienced difficulties “such as long waiting lists or ineligibility”. Respondents described unreturned calls, minimum waits after the death, long waiting lists and eligibility that depended on postcode. One wrote that a charity had said it would add them to its waiting list, but “probably wouldn’t be able to get back to me for 7 months”^[1]. This was a self-selected sample of adults during an exceptional period, so it cannot say how common such waits are, or what children face. It does show that waiting lists were among the barriers bereaved people described.

Practitioners describe the same pressure from the other side. A survey of 805 health and social care professionals working in hospices, hospitals, care homes and community settings across the UK and Ireland, carried out between 3 August and 4 September 2020, found that for some services the rise in deaths had led to increased waiting lists^[7]. Again, this was a snowball sample, and it covered bereavement care for all ages.

Children themselves rarely appear in this evidence. The UK Commission on Bereavement, which surveyed bereaved children and young people for its 2022 report, published their words rather than waiting figures. One young person aged 13 to 15 wrote: “Everyone sees it as me just misbehaving maybe if teachers and any other adults involved were trained to see the signs I wouldn’t of been left for the last 18months with no support.” The Commission also heard that support from services designed for bereaved children and young people was “really helpful”^[8]. That quotation is about support not being offered at all, rather than a waiting list, but for a child the difference may not be visible: both are time spent without help.

Services report more demand than they can meet

Waiting lists form when demand outruns capacity, and the clearest evidence on capacity comes from the United States. In the National Alliance for Children’s Grief survey of 424 professionals, run online in autumn 2025 and promoted through the Alliance’s own networks, three in four (75%) said their organisation faced increasing demand, and 41% said it cannot fully meet that demand. Limited funding was named as a major challenge by 53%, and staffing shortages or limited capacity by 35%. Nearly half of the responding organisations had five or fewer staff^[4].

These are self-reports from a self-selected group, not an audit of every service. They do not tell us how long any child waited. But an organisation that cannot meet demand has three choices: turn families away, ask them to wait, or offer less to each. Without data on waits, it is impossible to know which of these is happening, where, or to whom. Differences between areas are covered in our study of regional inequality in children’s bereavement services.

Children’s mental health waits are measured, and often long, but they are not bereavement waits

The waiting-time figures that do exist come from children’s mental health services. They are included here as context, because bereaved children who need specialist mental health care may be referred to these services, and because they show what routine measurement looks like. They are not a measure of waits for bereavement support, and none of the sources below records whether a child has been bereaved.

In England, the Children’s Commissioner reported that 1,048,965 children had active referrals to children and young people’s mental health services in 2024–25, up from 563,639 in 2018–19. Children who received treatment waited a median of 35 days, the same as in the previous two years. Children who were still waiting at the end of the year had waited a median of 224 days, and 16% of them (60,041 children) had been waiting longer than two years^[5].

Scotland measures against a national standard: 90% of children and young people should start treatment within 18 weeks of referral to child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). In the quarter ending June 2026, 90.9% did, and 4,379 children and young people were on a waiting list to start treatment. The standard was first met in the quarter ending December 2024^[9].

In Ontario, Canada, a 2020 survey of community child and youth mental health centres by Children’s Mental Health Ontario counted 28,000 children and young people under 18 on waiting lists, against an estimated 12,000 in its previous survey in 2017. Average waits were 67 days for counselling and therapy and 92 days for intensive treatment; the longest reported wait was 919 days, about two and a half years^[10]. These figures are now several years old, and we found no more recent edition.

The measures differ (medians, averages, a share within a target, a count), and the systems differ, so these figures cannot be compared with one another or read as a trend. What they share is the last column.

What the evidence asks of us

The first thing the evidence asks for is measurement. Services that keep waiting lists already know how many families are on them and for how long. If national childhood bereavement networks, in any country, asked their members to report the same few figures each year (the time from referral to first contact, the number waiting, and any minimum period after a death), the gap at the centre of this study could close quickly, without new systems. Health services could do their part by recording bereavement as a reason for referral, so that bereaved children’s waits in mental health services could be seen rather than guessed.

The second is a clear expectation of what a reasonable wait is. Health systems that publish waits tend to set a standard against which they are judged: Scotland’s is that 90% of children start mental health treatment within 18 weeks^[9], and Children’s Mental Health Ontario has called for funding to ensure that “no child or young person waits longer than 30 days for mental health treatment”^[10]. No comparable expectation exists for bereavement support for children.

The third is support during any wait. The UK pandemic survey’s authors recommended greater resourcing and expansion of national support “as well as regional services in areas with long waiting lists”^[1], and the UK Commission on Bereavement asked for more funding for specialist support “so more bereaved children and young people can get the help they need”^[8]. Where a minimum period after the death is policy, families benefit from knowing why, and from knowing who they can contact in the meantime. Where it reflects capacity, funders are the people who can change it.

Finally, the evidence on timing needs renewing. The meta-analysis cited here, suggesting that time-sensitive intervention matters, is from 2007^[6]. Services and researchers deciding when to offer support to bereaved children deserve better evidence than that. For what else is missing, see our study of the data gaps on bereaved children, and the rest of our research library on children bereaved of a parent.

Language: this piece uses plain words such as “died” rather than euphemisms, because they are clearer. “Waiting list” and “wait” are used for the time between asking for support and receiving it; a minimum period after a death is described separately because it is a policy choice rather than a shortage of places.

Why we're publishing this

Bereavement services for children are asked to show their reach, their outcomes and their value, often by funders who expect figures. A waiting list is one of the most direct signs that need is going unmet, yet it is almost never reported. We have gathered what can be seen, from several countries, so that the organisations supporting bereaved children, and the families waiting for them, can point to the evidence and to its absence. The case for measuring these waits, and for funding services so that they shorten, belongs to them.

How to read this data

There are no official statistics on waits for children’s bereavement support in any country we searched. The bereavement evidence here is of three kinds: published policies of individual UK services, which are examples rather than a sample; self-selected surveys of bereaved adults (UK) and of professionals (UK and Ireland; US), which describe their respondents and cannot be generalised to all services; and one meta-analysis of intervention trials from 2007. None of these measured waits in days or weeks, and none was limited to children bereaved of a parent. The mental health figures from England (2024–25), Scotland (quarter ending June 2026) and Ontario, Canada (2020) are official or sector statistics, but they cover all children referred to those services, use different measures, and cannot be compared with each other or with bereavement support. They are context, not evidence of how long bereaved children wait. Most of the evidence comes from English-speaking countries; we found nothing on this question from the Nordic countries, continental Europe or low- and middle-income countries.

Use this data

Free to cite with attribution to Understanding Bereavement. Charities, schools, services and journalists are welcome to reuse these figures and charts. For the underlying figures as a spreadsheet, get in touch.

Important: This study summarises published research about groups of people for general information. It is not medical advice or bereavement support, and it cannot describe or predict anything about an individual child or family. If you are worried about a child or about yourself, please speak to a GP or another qualified professional.

Sources

1. Harrop E, Goss S, Farnell D, et al. Support needs and barriers to accessing support: baseline results of a mixed-methods national survey of people bereaved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Palliative Medicine, 2021. europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC8637353
2. St Helena. Bereavement support for children. St Helena hospice, accessed October 2026. sthelena.org.uk/what-we-offer/bereavement-support-and-referrals/bereavement-support-for-children
3. St Nicholas Hospice Care. Nicky’s Way – support for children. St Nicholas Hospice Care, accessed October 2026. stnicholashospice.org.uk/…/nickys-way-support-for-children
4. National Alliance for Children’s Grief. 2025 Childhood Bereavement Professional Survey Report. NACG, 2026. nacg.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2025-Childhood-Bereavement-Professional-Survey-Report.pdf
5. Children’s Commissioner for England. Children’s and young people’s mental health services: 2024–25. Children’s Commissioner for England, 2026. assets.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wpuploads/2026/06/Childrens-Mental-Health-Annual-Briefing-24-25.pdf
6. Currier JM, Holland JM, Neimeyer RA. The effectiveness of bereavement interventions with children: a meta-analytic review of controlled outcome research. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 2007. europepmc.org/article/MED/17484697
7. Pearce C, Honey JR, Lovick R, et al. ‘A silent epidemic of grief’: a survey of bereavement care provision in the UK and Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic. BMJ Open, 2021. europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC7931210
8. UK Commission on Bereavement. Bereavement is everyone’s business: children and young people briefing. UK Commission on Bereavement (hosted by Marie Curie), 2022. mariecurie.org.uk/document/ukcb-children-and-young-people-briefing
9. Public Health Scotland. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) waiting times: quarter ending June 2026. Public Health Scotland, 2026. publichealthscotland.scot/publications/…/camhs-waiting-times-quarter-ending-june-2026
10. Children’s Mental Health Ontario. Kids Can’t Wait: 2020 Report. CMHO, 2020. cmho.org/wp-content/uploads/CMHO-Report-WaitTimes-2020.pdf