Client Voices

Comfort Zone Camp Founder Lynne Hughes in the Huffington Post: “It’s Time for a National Conversation on Childhood Bereavement”

Lynne Hughes, Founder of Comfort Zone Camp, the nation’s largest provider of free bereavement camps for kids, recently authored the first in a series of blog posts on childhood grief for The Huffington Post.

In her piece, Hughes describes the need to provide better support for grieving families and not shy away from reaching out to the “forgotten mourners”— grieving children. Despite its prevalence, shockingly little has been reported on the subject of childhood loss, partly because of a paucity of research.

To address this need and better understand the impact of losing a parent/sibling at a young age, Comfort Zone Camp commissioned a national survey on the issue, discovering that one in nine Americans reported losing a parent before the age of 20 and the effects of that loss were profound and enduring. More than half of Americans (57%) said they would trade a year of their life for one more day with their parent and 73% believe their life would have been “much better” if their parent hadn’t died so young.

“Childhood bereavement is one of society's most chronically painful yet rarely examined and most underestimated phenomena,” Hughes wrote. “Fearful of burdening their surviving parent— and growing up in a society that runs from the mention of death and grief— kids who lose loved ones get the message early on that people are uncomfortable talking about their loss, so they suffer in silence.”

To read the full article, click here.

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