Kids in Colorado’s poorest counties are more likely to experience the death of a parent, sibling

Children who live in Colorado’s lowest-income counties are 131% more likely to experience a parent or sibling death than their peers living in the highest-income counties, according to a new report by Judi’s House and the JAG Institute in Aurora.

And those lowest-income counties also happen to be Colorado’s most rural, the study says.

Micki Burns, CEO of Judi’s House, said authors of the study grouped counties together based on median income and came up with “five income distribution bands.” They then ran the groups through a statistical tool called the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model to calculate their findings. 

They found that in the lowest-income category in the state, where counties’ combined median income sits between $34,000 and $65,000, 11.8% of children, or 1 in 8, are estimated to experience the death of a close family member by the age of 18. 

Among counties with a median income range of  $78,841 to $96,360, 8.4% of kids, or 1 in 12, experience the same. 

And in the highest-income counties, where the combined median income sits between $110,000 to $140,000, only 5.1% or 1 in 20 kids are estimated to lose a parent or sibling before they’re 18. 

The 131% figure came from a comparison of the three lowest-income counties — Costilla, Jackson and Crowley — with the three highest — Douglas, Broomfield and Elbert, according to 2018-2022 National Institutes of Health statistics.  

Colorado currently ranks 35th among U.S. states for the probability a child will experience the death of a parent or sibling before they reach adulthood. 

And according to a 2020 loss-of-parent-only bereavement study within Colorado, Costilla County ranked the highest with 7.6%, Huerfano had 6.8%, Conejos had 6% and Las Animas had 5.5%. 

Burns said the counties with the highest prevalence are “on the edges” of Colorado, where “you tend to have less access to things like healthy food, health care, quality education, clean water and stable housing.” 

That’s especially true in the lowest-income areas, “where there doesn’t tend to be a lot of industry, and a lot of the jobs are more agrarian,” she added. 

But agriculture is becoming more and more mechanized, and as ag jobs are disappearing, even fewer people are staying, she said. A new NIH report forthcoming in 2025 will give a clearer picture, but Burns expects to see a continued move away from these communities because the lack of access to resources can make staying too difficult.

When it comes to the causes of parental deaths leading to childhood bereavement, similarities exist across all five income groups, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data on deaths of adults ages 25-49 from 2018 to 2022.

Suicide ranked second across the board, after accidental injury, for adults in the group most likely to have children.  

Chronic liver disease, often attributed to alcoholism, ranked consistently in the top five. 

Homicide was in the top 10 on every list. 

And each county had a significant percentage of accidental drug overdoses, with the group making a median income of $78,841 to $96,360 ranking highest, with 19.3% of all accidental deaths attributed to overdoses.  

But perhaps most importantly, losing a parent or sibling early in life can lead to a host of health concerns in children. 

Burns said 1 in 4 young people ages 10 to 19 who died by suicide between 2014 and 2016 experienced bereavement prior to their death. 

A staggering number of children whose parents die by suicide will have suicidal thoughts themselves, added Judy Austin, executive director at The Grief Center of Southwest Colorado in Durango.

They often don’t follow through, but Burns said children who don’t get appropriate support during bereavement are at risk for a number of negative potential life outcomes. 

These can range from academic difficulties to dropping out of school to relationship challenges and hardships maintaining employment “all the way up to data that shows earlier mortality than their peers,” she added. 

Children in the richest counties often have a better chance at getting that help, thanks to places like Judi’s House, which was created by former Denver Broncos quarterback Brian Griese, whose mother, Judi, died of breast cancer when he was 12. The Denver-based Judi’s House gives kids help through counseling services, training and research.

But getting help to grieving kids in rural Colorado is another story, Austin said. 

Most of the children she helps are grieving “traumatic deaths,” like homicide, suicide and those related to substance abuse, “so we’re offering individual and family therapy around that,” she added. 

And in rural areas, “there’s a lot of stigma around accessing care,” so along with a lack of resources there is “sometimes frustration with the people trying to provide the resources,” she said. “We did some work in a high school after a death to suicide, and a group of teens wanted services and their parents would not approve it.”

That’s “a vein of thinking” in the rural communities Austin serves, “that runs really deep,” she added. It comes from a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality” and, often, a distrust of outsiders. In the case of the high schoolers, “it may simply have been who are these people that want to talk to our kids? They don’t live here. They don’t own businesses here,” she said.

“So we work hard to try to have what we call the Grow Your Own method. We use a lot of graduate interns, and we really try to recruit people from rural and tribal communities. But the reality is they’re hard to find. It’s not a field that other family members have been in. So that’s a hard one because what would be ideal is ‘it’s so and so and you know them.’”

In a corner of Colorado that doesn’t get a lot of attention, the option for grief care is needed, said Austin, who last year counseled around 480 grieving people, 60% of whom were children and families.

Burns said getting more help to all rural Colorado communities was an impetus for the study, which calls on advocates, policy makers and “systems of care” to pour more resources in those directions.