Faith, Culture and Grief: What Research Shows About Bereaved Children

Children whose parent has died grow up in every faith and none, and their families mark a death in very different ways. Yet the evidence on grief comes from a narrow slice of the world: a 2026 review found that most research on grief interventions comes from Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic populations, and found only 14 randomised trials from under-represented regions^[1].

For a child whose mum or dad has died, the days and weeks after the death are shaped by what their family believes and does. There may be prayers at home, a burial within a day, a wake, a cremation, a period of set mourning, visitors for a week, or anniversaries kept for years. A child may be at the centre of these rituals or kept away from them. All of this shapes when a family is ready to talk to a school and whether the support on offer feels built for them. This study sets out what research from several countries shows about faith, culture and children's grief, and where the evidence runs out.

Bereaved children grow up in many faiths, and in none

We found no global count of bereaved children by religion, and no country that publishes one. What population statistics do show is how varied the settings are. Pew Research Center's estimates for 2020, built from more than 2,700 data sources covering 201 countries and territories, put Christians at 28.8% of the world's population, Muslims at 25.6%, people with no religious affiliation at 24.2%, Hindus at 14.9%, Buddhists at 4.1% and Jews at about 0.2%^[3]. These are modelled estimates, not a headcount.

Within a single country the picture shifts quickly. In England and Wales, the 2021 census found that 46.2% of people described themselves as Christian, down from 59.3% in 2011, while 37.2% said they had no religion, up from 25.2%. Muslims were 6.5% of the population (3.9 million people), up from 4.9%, and Hindus 1.7%^[4]. A single bereavement service may support families from several faiths, and none.

Families who share a faith can mourn very differently, and families with no religion have their own customs. The research below describes patterns across groups; it cannot tell anyone what a particular family believes or needs.

What counts as “expected” grief is partly set by culture

Grief is a normal response to a death, not a disorder. A minority of bereaved people develop prolonged grief disorder, a condition now recognised in both major diagnostic manuals (see our study on prolonged grief disorder in children). The criteria themselves lean on culture. The American Psychiatric Association's description says the death must have happened at least a year ago for adults and at least 6 months ago for children and adolescents, and that the person's grief must last "longer than might be expected based on social, cultural, or religious norms"^[5]. What looks prolonged in one community may be an ordinary period of mourning in another.

Researchers are only beginning to test whether these measures travel. A 2026 study of young adults (average age 19) in Kenya, Namibia and South Africa found that, despite much higher exposure to loss than in Western samples, rates of probable prolonged grief disorder were similar: 9.63% in Kenya, 6.85% in South Africa and 5.34% in Namibia, against a global average of 9.8% from earlier studies. The most common death was of a grandparent (40.6%); for 19.2%, the person who died was a parent^[6]. The authors note that in many African contexts bereaved people keep ongoing bonds with the dead "through beliefs about the active role of ancestors in daily life and through extended mourning rituals", and warn that diagnostic frameworks "predominantly derived from Western samples" may miss culturally specific ways of grieving^[6]. A lower measured rate could mean protection, or a measure that does not fit.

Migration adds another layer. Among 937 adults of Turkish background in Germany, 5.97% of the first generation and 5.45% of the second met criteria for prolonged grief disorder, and grief connected to migration itself, which the authors call migratory grief, was linked to grief symptoms in both generations^[7]. These are adult samples, not children, and the studies used different measures, so their rates should not be compared directly with each other.

Rituals seem to help most when families can shape them

It is often assumed that taking part in funerals and mourning rituals helps the bereaved. The evidence is more mixed. A 2022 review of 17 studies (screened from 805 records) found the evidence on funeral practices and bereaved relatives' mental health "inconclusive": five observational studies found benefits from taking part in a funeral, and six did not. What the qualitative research added was a clearer pattern: the benefit of after-death rituals "depends on the ability of the bereaved to shape those rituals and say goodbye in a way which is meaningful for them"^[8].

The COVID-19 pandemic, when funerals were restricted in many countries, became an unplanned test of this. In a study of bereaved adults from several countries, 50 bereaved in the year before the pandemic and 182 during it, people bereaved during the pandemic rated the impact of the restrictions on the funeral and grief rituals as negative. Attendance at the funeral and how people judged it were related to prolonged grief symptoms, while the performance of other grief rituals was not; half of participants found helpful alternative rituals^[9]. This is a small, self-selected online sample, and it covers adults, not children. Our study on children bereaved during COVID-19 looks at that group directly.

For children, the closest population-level evidence comes from Sweden. A nationwide survey of 622 young adults (a 73% response rate) whose parent had died of cancer when they were 13 to 16 asked, 6 to 9 years later, about the first months after the death. Fifty-seven per cent said they had not had a way to grieve that felt okay during the first 6 months, and that group had 4.32 times the odds of reporting unresolved grief years later. Fifteen per cent said they had been discouraged from grieving, and 24% had hidden their grief to protect their surviving parent^[10]. The study did not look at faith or culture, but it shows how much it matters whether a young person feels allowed to grieve in their own way.

Faiths that require prompt burial meet systems that run on office hours

For some families, the timing of a funeral is set by religious law, and the hours after a death are spent trying to make it happen. The clearest official statement of this we found is from England and Wales, where many deaths are reported to a coroner before a body can be released. The Chief Coroner's Guidance No. 28, issued on 17 May 2018 following a court decision, says that "some faith groups, particularly Jewish and Muslim, have religious and cultural wishes", including that "the body should be buried on the day of death or as soon as possible thereafter"^[11].

The guidance sets out a balance. It states that "a Coroner cannot lawfully exclude religious reasons for seeking expedition of decisions", but also that the court's decision "does not require a coroner to give automatic priority to deaths from particular religious communities", and that coroners should weigh a well-founded request for speed against the interests of other families. It also records that "in many coroner areas, there is no general provision of services outside of office hours"^[11]. We found no national figures on how often requests for an urgent release are made or met, or on how long families wait.

For children, a funeral within a day or two leaves little time to be told what is happening, to decide whether to go, or for their school to hear before it is over. We did not find comparable official guidance from other countries within this study's search, and practice varies between legal systems; this should not be read as a picture of everywhere.

Faith and community can be a resource, and the deaths fall unevenly

For some young people, faith is part of how they cope. A 2020 study of 2,425 bereaved young people with an average age of 15 (the country is not stated in the abstract) looked separately at different sides of religious life. Greater attendance at religious services was associated with lower substance use; placing more importance on religious beliefs was associated with lower substance use and higher self-esteem; and greater use of religious coping was associated with better academic achievement^[12]. These are associations in one survey, not evidence that religion causes better outcomes.

Community and social ties also seem to shape how a parent's death plays out across a life. In a US cohort of 9,508 people followed from adolescence, Black participants experienced the death of a parent most often and earliest in life. Among Black and Hispanic participants, the timing of a parent's death was not linked with psychological distress in early midlife, a pattern the authors frame as a “minority grief paradox”. In those two groups, social support accumulated by midlife independently accounted for a meaningful share of the pattern (about 16% and 20% respectively)^[13]. The study cannot say whether this reflects strong shared ways of carrying grief or measures that miss some distress.

What is clearer is that the deaths themselves fall unevenly. In the United States, more than 140,000 children experienced the death of a parent or grandparent caregiver associated with COVID-19 between April 2020 and June 2021, and the risk was 1.1 to 4.5 times higher among children from racial and ethnic minority groups than among non-Hispanic White children. These figures are estimated from fertility and mortality data, not counted^[2]. Services designed around one majority culture are, in practice, being asked to support children from the communities where COVID-19-associated parental deaths were most common.

The evidence comes from a narrow slice of the world

The most consistent finding of this study is about the research itself. The 2026 review of grief interventions outside Western, high-income settings found 14 randomised trials with 1,122 participants in total. Taken together, those interventions had a moderate-to-large effect compared with control conditions, but the results varied widely between trials, and the authors called for more high-quality trials and for "culturally sensitive and contextually grounded approaches"^[1]. Our study on what helps bereaved children covers the wider trial evidence.

Even the strongest studies quietly narrow who is counted. The Swedish survey of cancer-bereaved teenagers described above, a nationwide population-based study, required participants to be fluent in Swedish^[10]. Young people from families who speak other languages at home may therefore be under-represented. A new international archive pooling prolonged grief data on 16,666 bereaved people from 32 datasets across nine countries found that about 70% of participants were women, and said future additions "should prioritize the inclusion of underrepresented groups (e.g. migrants)"^[14].

The gaps that matter most for this library are about children:

• We found no national statistics, in any country, that count bereaved children by their family's religion or culture.
• We found no large study comparing children's grief or later outcomes across faith groups, and few studies of children's grief at all from Africa, Asia or Latin America. The African study above was of young adults, not children^[6].
• We found no published figures on how many families from minority faiths use childhood bereavement services, in the UK or elsewhere, within the scope of this search.

What the evidence asks of us

The evidence is thin, but it does not support a checklist of what each faith "does" when someone dies. It supports services that ask, listen and adapt.

• Ask families, don't assume. Diagnostic criteria for prolonged grief already defer to "social, cultural, or religious norms"^[5]. Assessment and support for children can do the same, by asking each family what mourning looks like for them and what they want for their child.
• Make room for families to shape rituals. The benefit of after-death rituals appears to depend on whether the bereaved can shape them in a way that is meaningful to them^[8], and Swedish teenagers who were discouraged from grieving or hid their grief were more likely to report unresolved grief years later^[10]. Schools and services can help children feel allowed to grieve in their family's way, including when that differs from the majority around them.
• Plan for speed where faith requires it. Where burial must be prompt, children may need to hear about a death and its rituals within hours. Coroners, hospitals and registrars can build on existing guidance that religious reasons for expedition may not be ruled out^[11], and schools can have a way to respond quickly. Publishing data on urgent release requests would show whether that guidance is working.
• Fund research beyond the usual populations. Researchers have called for culturally grounded approaches and for the inclusion of migrants and other under-represented groups^[1][14]. Funders can ask that studies of bereaved children recruit beyond the majority language, and report results by ethnicity and faith where samples allow.
• Collect the basic data. We found no published figures on how far minority faith communities use childhood bereavement services. Recording families' faith and ethnicity, with consent, would show whether support is reaching the communities where, as the US COVID-19 figures show, parental deaths can be most common^[2].

For how bereavement support is distributed more broadly, see our study on access to bereavement support.

Language: this piece uses plain words such as “died” rather than euphemisms, because they are clearer. It describes patterns across groups and does not describe what any individual family or faith community believes.

Why we're publishing this

Bereavement services, hospices and schools work with families from every faith and from none, and the people in those organisations know that a one-size approach does not fit. We publish this so that childhood bereavement charities, faith communities and the professionals who work alongside them can point to the evidence when they make the case for support that fits the families they serve, and for research that includes children who have so far been left out. It is part of our library on children and young people bereaved of a parent.

How to read this data

The religion figures are a census count for England and Wales (2021) and modelled global estimates from Pew Research Center (2020). The US COVID-19 caregiver figures are modelled estimates, not counts. The Swedish teenager study is a nationwide survey of young people identified through the national cause-of-death register, with a 73% response rate; its figures are self-reported memories of grief 6 to 9 years earlier, and its odds ratios are associations, not proof of cause. The prolonged grief studies from Kenya, Namibia, South Africa and Germany use screening questionnaires to estimate “probable” disorder, involve adults or young adults rather than children, and used different measures, so their rates are not directly comparable. The coroner guidance applies to England and Wales only. Most studies come from high-income countries, and almost none were designed to compare faith or cultural groups.

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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