Ashlyn Stone's partner, Hayden Hansen, died in a car accident in Kaysville, Utah in 2020, leaving two young children without their father—and without the support that such families desperately need. Stone wasn't just grieving; she was navigating a system designed to help but failing to reach her. No one from public agencies reached out. She was initially told her children didn't qualify for Social Security survivor benefits because she and Hansen had been unmarried. It took her aunt, a financial planner, and a friend's recommendation to therapy to piece together the resources her children needed. She had to stumble into The Sharing Place, a grief counseling nonprofit, only after she happened to move near one of their locations.
Stone's experience reflects a national crisis that has largely gone unnoticed. Across the United States, an estimated 5.5 million children—7.6 percent of all children—will lose a parent. Yet fewer than half of those eligible actually receive Social Security survivor benefits, which average $1,100 per month. Even fewer have access to grief counseling and support. Children in Black, Tribal, and rural communities are particularly abandoned by the system, living in what researchers call "bereavement deserts."
The need has only grown more urgent. A study published in Nature Medicine in 2025 found that between 2000 and 2021, new instances of children losing a parent or primary caregiver rose by nearly 50 percent, while the total number of affected children grew by about 8 percent. Two-thirds of all children will experience a traumatic event before age 16, but the loss of a parent stands out as one of the most distressing.
But in Utah, that's beginning to change. Since 2023, state officials and nonprofits have launched a coordinated initiative to help bereaved children access Social Security survivor benefits and grief counseling—a comprehensive response that has made Utah something of a national outlier. The effort was born from work by the Children's Collaborative for Healing and Support, a bipartisan group of health experts and government officials formed in 2021 to address the needs of children who've lost a parent or primary caregiver.
What makes Utah's approach distinctive is its commitment to training frontline workers. Julie Kaplow, an expert on childhood grief and director of the Trauma and Grief Center at Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute in Texas, has been providing Multidimensional Grief Therapy training to clinicians and community members across the state. Utah is the only state that has asked Kaplow to train the people who make contact with grieving children and their families. "Utah is kind of a standout in that way," Kaplow says.
This matters because grief and trauma require different approaches, and most children who lose a parent won't develop prolonged complications—they'll go on to lead healthy, productive lives. But roughly 20 percent will struggle with maladaptive grief, particularly those with limited social support or preexisting mental illness. Early identification and evidence-based intervention within the first two years can be transformative. Kaplow emphasizes that "bereavement is actually the most common form of trauma among kids in the United States," yet these children remain widely overlooked by systems designed to help them.
For Ashlyn Stone's family, the question is no longer whether help exists—it's whether more states will follow Utah's lead and ensure that the next grieving child doesn't have to stumble through loss alone.