Bereavement Among Children in Care and Kinship Care: What the Data Show

Where it has been measured, children who grow up in care are far more likely than other children to have a parent who has died. In Sweden, a quarter of young people who had been in long-term care had a parent who had died by the age of 18^[1]. Yet a parent's death is rarely the recorded reason a child comes into care, and in most of the statistics we found it is barely visible. In the United States, “death of caretaker” was recorded for 1% of children entering foster care in federal fiscal year 2025^[2].

For a child in foster care, residential care or living with a grandparent or aunt, a parent's death can arrive in many ways. Sometimes it is the reason the child is there at all. For many, the evidence suggests, it comes later: a mother or father the child no longer lives with, but still thinks about, still sees on contact visits, or still hopes to go home to. That grief can be hard for others to see. This study brings together what statistics and research from several countries show, and where the gaps are. It is part of our research library on bereaved children.

A parent's death is rarely the recorded reason a child enters care

Care systems often record why children come into care. The clearest national figures we found come from the United States, where states report to the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS), and there a parent's death sits near the bottom of the list. Of 175,008 children who entered foster care between October 2024 and September 2025, “death of caretaker” was recorded for 2,122, or 1%. Neglect was recorded for 55% and caretaker drug use for 29%^[2]. These are preliminary figures, and a child can have several circumstances recorded at once, so the shares add up to more than 100%^[2].

The same pattern appears among kinship carers in Britain, though from a much weaker source. In a 2020 survey by the charity Grandparents Plus (now Kinship), 561 kinship carers in England, Scotland and Wales chose the main reasons the child they were raising could not live with their parents. They could pick more than one. Neglect was chosen by 46% and parental drug or alcohol misuse by 45%; the death of a parent by 6%^[3]. The survey was promoted online and through the charity's own networks, and its authors say plainly that the findings “only represent the kinship carers who took part”^[3].

For other countries, including the UK nations and Australia, we found no published national statistic on how many children in care have had a parent die. And a reason-for-entry field says nothing about a parent who dies after the child has come into care, which, as the next section shows, is where much of the bereavement in care seems to happen.

Yet many children in care have a parent who has died

Following children through care and beyond gives a very different picture. The strongest evidence comes from Sweden, where national registers link care records to the cause-of-death register.

A study of 12 Swedish birth cohorts (1972–1983) compared 35,550 young people who had been in out-of-home care with 1,138,726 peers who had not. Among those who had been in long-term care, 26% had at least one parent who had died by age 18, against 4% of peers never in care. By age 25 the gap had widened: 36% against 7%^[1]. Young people from long-term care were also far more likely to have no living parent: 3–4% at age 18, against 0.03% of peers. Their figures for a mother who had died (11%) and a father who had died (11–13%) compared with 1% and 3% among peers^[1].

The timing matters. For children in short-term and intermediate care, most of the parents who had died did so before the child entered care. For young people in long-term care, a parent's death after the placement began was most common^[1]. A reason-for-entry statistic would never record those deaths.

A later Swedish register study, covering 948,483 people born 1972–1981, found a smaller but still clear gap across everyone who had been in care, not only long-term placements. Around 5% of those with out-of-home care experience had a parent die before age 20, against about 2% of the general population^[4]. The two studies define their groups differently and are not directly comparable. Both point the same way: having a parent die is at least twice as common among children who have been in care as among their peers, and far more common among those in long-term care.

Death and care often share the same roots

Why should children in care so often have a parent who has died? Partly, the researchers suggest, because the circumstances that bring children into care can also shorten parents' lives. In the 1972–1981 Swedish cohorts, 45% of men who had been in care had a mother with at least one record of means-tested social assistance (the study's measure of poverty), against 5.4% of men who had not^[4]. The researchers point to “parental substance misuse or psychiatric problems, often coupled with socioeconomic disadvantages” as causes that can lie beneath both placement and a parent's early death^[4]. In the US, caretaker drug use was recorded for 29% of children entering foster care in 2025^[2]. Our study of children bereaved by drug- and alcohol-related deaths looks at that overlap in more detail.

The same Swedish team asked whether a parent's death during care adds to the risks already carried by children in care. For early death in adulthood (ages 20–47), both out-of-home care and parental death were linked with higher risk on their own. But the analysis “revealed no moderating effect of parental death on the association between placement and premature all-cause mortality”: for children already in care, a parent's death did not add measurable extra risk^[4]. The authors suggest possible reasons, including “strong attachments within the out-of-home care setting or reduced stress towards biological parents”^[4].

A companion study of psychiatric disorders in the same cohorts, 944,138 people of whom 23,106 (2.5%) had been in care, reached a similar conclusion: parental death “adds limited risk within a highly vulnerable and disadvantaged population”^[5]. These findings do not show that grief does not matter to children in care. They are long-term population averages, and say nothing about how a child copes in the months after a parent dies. They suggest bereavement in care sits on top of many other adversities. The authors themselves stress “interventions addressing multiple risks across developmental periods”^[5].

When a death is the reason, the path through care can be longer

The children who do come into care because a parent has died are a small group, and they are rarely studied on their own. One US study compared children in foster care because of a parent's death, or a parent's imprisonment, with children in care because of maltreatment. The authors report that entering care because of a parent's death “more than doubled the average time to exit” (their reading of a hazard ratio of 2.32; only the abstract was available to us), and that these children had lower odds of leaving care to a permanent home (odds ratio 0.35)^[6]. The authors concluded that “a one-size-fits-all approach to policy and practice may not be useful” for these children^[6].

Much of child welfare is built around returning a child safely to their parents. When a parent has died, that route may not exist. We found only this single study; the result needs confirming elsewhere and with more recent data.

Kinship care carries much of the load

Relatives are often the people who step in. In the US in 2025, 43% of children entering foster care were first placed with relatives or kin, and 39% of the 331,747 children in foster care on 30 September 2025 were living with relatives or kin^[2]. Among the 17,702 children who left foster care to legal guardianship that year, 82% had been living with relatives or kin^[2]. These figures cover all children in foster care, not only bereaved ones, and they leave out informal arrangements in which a grandparent or other relative takes a child in without the care system being involved.

Kinship carers of bereaved children are often grieving too: a grandparent raising a grandchild after their own son or daughter has died is bereaved of a child at the same time. The British kinship survey, for all its limits, found strong commitment, with 87% of respondents saying they were proud of their role^[3]. We found no national statistics, in any country we searched, on how many kinship families are formed after a parent's death. Our study on children bereaved by COVID-19 covers one recent wave of such deaths.

Worldwide, residential care is often about poverty, but bereavement is common

Outside the countries with registers and federal reporting systems, the evidence is thinner still. A 2017 study compiling data on children in residential and foster care drew on 142 countries covering more than 80% of the world's children. It estimated that approximately 2.7 million children aged 0–17 “could be living in institutional care worldwide”, while noting that “many countries still lack functional administrative systems for enumerating children living outside of family care”^[7]. That estimate does not say how many of those children have had a parent die.

Institutions for children are often called orphanages, though many of the children in them have a living parent. A national study in Cambodia shows how that can sit alongside widespread bereavement. Researchers counted 3,588 children in 122 institutions across 24 communes, estimated that 48,775 children were living in residential care nationally, and interviewed 1,737 children aged 13–17^[8]. Almost 80% had at least one living parent, and the researchers describe children living in residential care “to escape poverty and pursue educational opportunities”^[8]. Yet only 43.6% had both parents alive. Another 22.7% had only their mother alive, 12.2% only their father, and 18.5% had no living parent (“both deceased”)^[8]. By our calculation from that table, more than half (53.4%) had at least one parent who had died.

So having a living parent and being bereaved are not opposites. A child with a living mother may still be grieving a father, and still be in an institution partly because his death left the family poorer. Moving children from institutions back to families means planning for that grief too.

An analysis of nationally representative Violence Against Children Surveys in Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe (6,405 young people aged 13–17) studied young people who had lived in alternative care. Its authors concluded that “national data collection efforts should distinguish between residential and family-based care”^[9]. The same applies to bereavement. For more on missing data across the field, see our study of the data gaps on bereaved children.

What the evidence asks of us

The evidence is uneven, but it points in a few clear directions for care systems, kinship services, bereavement organisations and funders.

• Record bereavement throughout care, not only at entry. A reason-for-entry field caught 1% of US entries^[2], while Swedish registers showed that for young people in long-term care, a parent's death after placement began was the most common pattern^[1]. Recording a parent's death whenever it happens would show the true scale and let services reach children in time.
• Name grief in care guidance. England's NICE guideline on looked-after children and young people (2021) asks that carers' trauma-informed training cover “understanding attachment and loss”^[10]. In our search of its recommendations we found no explicit mention of bereavement, grief or a parent's death. Guidance in any country could say plainly that a parent's death, before or during care, is common among these children and calls for a response from the people around them.
• Plan for permanence differently after a death. The US evidence that children in care because of a parent's death wait longer for a permanent home^[6] suggests early planning with relatives, and support for kinship carers who are often grieving themselves.
• Treat bereavement as one strand among many. The Swedish register studies suggest a parent's death adds limited measurable long-term risk for children already facing many adversities^[4][5]. Support needs to work with that whole picture, grief included.
• Build and test grief support designed for children in care. A US randomised trial of a peer grief support programme for young people in foster care, run with 78 young people aged 12–20, found large positive effects on hopefulness, social support and self-worth at six months, compared with a waitlist^[11]. It is one small trial, but it shows such support can be built and evaluated. See our study of what helps bereaved children for the wider evidence.

Language: this piece uses plain words such as “died” rather than euphemisms, because they are clearer. It uses “in care” to cover foster care, residential care and formal kinship placements, as each source defines them.

Why we're publishing this

Children in care and children raised by grandparents and other relatives are among the bereaved children least likely to be counted and, we suspect, least likely to be offered bereavement support designed with them in mind. The organisations that work with them, from fostering services and kinship charities to childhood bereavement services, need evidence to make the case for that support. We have tried to set out what is known, from every country where we could find it, and to be honest about how much is not.

How to read this data

The figures here come from very different kinds of source. The US AFCARS figures are official administrative statistics for one federal fiscal year (October 2024 to September 2025); they are preliminary, record circumstances at entry only, and allow several per child. The Swedish studies are whole-population register studies of people born between 1972 and 1983, so they describe care systems and lives of several decades ago; their adjusted results take account of some family factors but not all, and they show associations, not causes. The two Swedish studies use different groups and definitions and are not a trend. The British kinship figures come from a self-selected online survey and do not represent all kinship carers. The Cambodian parental status figures were reported by the children themselves. The US study of time in care and the grief support trial are single studies, and we found little from low- and middle-income countries outside Cambodia.

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

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2. US Children's Bureau. AFCARS FFY 2025 Foster Care Data Release: preliminary FFY 2025 estimates as of February 27, 2026 (No. 33). Administration for Children and Families, 2026. acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/2025-afcars-dashboard-printable.pdf
3. Grandparents Plus. State of the Nation 2020 (kinship carers survey). Grandparents Plus (now Kinship), 2020. kinship.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/annual-surevy-report-2020.pdf
4. Rogne S, Almquist YB, Brännström L. Parental death and premature mortality in individuals with out-of-home care experience in Sweden: a nationwide cohort study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2025. europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC12027392
5. Seker S, Brännström L, Forsman H, Rogne S. Parental death and psychiatric disorders among individuals with and without experience of out-of-home care: a Swedish nationwide cohort study. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2026. europepmc.org/article/MED/42354264
6. Shaw TV, Bright CL, Sharpe TL. Child welfare outcomes for youth in care as a result of parental death or parental incarceration. Child Abuse & Neglect, 2015. europepmc.org/article/MED/25641050
7. Petrowski N, Cappa C, Gross P. Estimating the number of children in formal alternative care: challenges and results. Child Abuse & Neglect, 2017. europepmc.org/article/MED/28578826
8. Stark L, Rubenstein BL, Pak K, Kosal S. National estimation of children in residential care institutions in Cambodia: a modelling study. BMJ Open, 2017. europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC5253596
9. Neville SE, Okunoren O, Crea TM. Youth who have lived in alternative care in Nigeria, Zambia, and Zimbabwe: mental health and violence outcomes in nationally representative data. JAACAP Open, 2023. europepmc.org/article/MED/37982091
10. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Looked-after children and young people (NG205): recommendations. NICE, 2021. nice.org.uk/guidance/ng205/chapter/Recommendations
11. Mitchell MB, Schuurman DL, Beam MR, Martinez J. “We need a safe place to talk about how we feel”: a randomized controlled trial of a peer grief support intervention for youth in foster care. Omega, 2025. europepmc.org/article/MED/40717031