-That first week that everything happened,
I was so stressed out.
I had so much built up.
I was exhausted.
I felt like the, I had the
weight of the world on my shoulders.
When Avion Simon’s mom fell sick with Covid last year and went to
the hospital, Avion stayed home and cared for his siblings, C.J.
and Momo, while juggling his own schoolwork, his job and football.
-You could tell how bad she was hurting.
I’ve never seen my mom, like, that sick before.
And so, I was helping take care of her and the kids.
I said everything’s going to be okay.
Don’t worry about anything.
You know you have me.
And I’ll always be there for you all.
They figured out that she had double pneumonia in both of
her lungs.
And that’s when it got worse.
I got to see her, but she couldn’t talk to me or anything.
I couldn’t recognize my mom.
She didn’t look the same as when she
left the house that Tuesday.
And then that morning at 1:14 she died.
I feel empty.
You have to wake up knowing you don’t have
any parents.
And go to sleep knowing that you have to, you don’t
have any parents.
That’s the hardest part for me.
Why did that happen to me and my family?
Like, why mine?
I don’t – it just – it don’t I don’t get it.
Across the country, more than 200,000 children and teens like
Avion, C.J., and Momo have lost a parent or caregiver to Covid.
Roughly 65% of them are children of color.
-I think there’s nothing like this that compares to the sheer
number of kids that have lost caregivers at, at, basically at
one moment in time.
-In the last two years, 200,000 children have lost a parent or a
primary caregiver because of Covid.
-We have to think, what are their psychological needs going to be?
And how will those needs be met?
Because otherwise those psychological consequences have
physical consequences as well.
Long term, these effects could be with them for the rest of their lives.
Over the last 25 years, scientists have come to understand that
adversity in childhood can have long-term impacts not only on
mental health, but on physical health.
That relationship was first discovered back in the
1980s through research Dr. Vincent Felitti started
at Kaiser Permanente.
-We started with a very detailed medical history and comprehensive
medical evaluation and then followed for the next 20 years.
-So this is the female health questionnaire,
health appraisal questionnaire…
The landmark study looked at ten kinds of adverse childhood
experiences, or ACES, among a group of 17,000 people, ranging
from abuse to exposure to a parent’s mental illness, to divorce.
-I have been physically abused as a child.
And matched them to risky health behavior and disease later in life.
-So we were able to look at specific questions, like, if a
person has any of these adverse childhood experiences, how does
that affect the likelihood of their having an autoimmune disease
somewhere over the next 20 years, or their getting cancer over the next
20 years, or becoming diabetic, or becoming chronically depressed, et cetera?
- Additional diseases, high blood pressure…
The results stunned Felitti along with his research partner
Robert Anda from the Centers for Disease Control.
-Adverse childhood experiences have a major and profound effect
on our most prevalent public health problems.
For instance, we found a high relationship to cancer.
And our initial thought was, yeah, well, you know, okay.
So you have a terrible childhood so you end up smoking two or three
packs a day, of course.
But that was just a very little piece.
The rest of it was even more shocking.
Even without risky behavior, ongoing or repeated
exposure to adversity increased the likelihood of later disease.
-What struck us was that we suddenly had an explanation for
medical problems that have been intractably difficult to deal with.
Felitti’s findings had vast implications for understanding the
risk and for prevention of many common diseases in the U.S.
-I assumed that that was going to catch on like wildfire
in medical circles.
It did not.
People didn't want to hear about it lest they
have to deal with it.
The comments that I hear commonly are, you know,
if I wanted to be a damn shrink, I’d have been a shrink.
But over the years, the idea that early adversity can lead to
disease has firmly taken root, as researchers have made strides in
understanding how the brain and the body respond to chronic stress.
In the face of a perceived threat, the body’s stress response system
turns on and the brain releases hormones like cortisol and
adrenaline that flood the body.
The heart rate speeds up, and
blood pressure increases.
Normally, the system switches off when the threat recedes.
-But when those systems are repeatedly left on, they don’t shut off,
it begins to have a negative impact.
It’s altering your physiology.
Immune systems become weakened.
And the likelihood of chronic disease, cancers
and heart disease go way up.
Beyond the original ten ACES, researchers are exploring whether
a wide array of childhood experiences, like poverty,
community violence, and racism, can affect the body in the way that
abuse or a parent’s divorce can.
-Kids growing up in low-income families are especially vulnerable
to toxic stress.
Today that’s nearly half the children under six in America.
-When children are regularly exposed to the stress of poverty,
violence, and substance abuse, it can have a lasting impact on their
mental and physical health.
Researchers are also looking at how to turn off, or calm down the
body’s stress response system.
-There are protective factors and things that we can do to help those
children not develop
those psychological and physical health consequences.
It can sometimes be as simple as creating a supportive environment,
or providing comfort to a child.
-The reason this has such a big effect on a child’s biological makeup
is that easing a child’s anxiety, helping them negotiate and
manage stress, reduces stress hormones and reduces the
physiological consequences of stressful experiences.
It kind of calms things down.
And as a result, the body doesn’t suffer as much.
But as Covid-19 spread, killing a million Americans, children often
lost the very person who played that role.
-The rug has been pulled out from underneath them.
And that buffering relationship isn’t there.
And the question is, what is a substitute for that
buffering relationship?
We need to think of this as a national disaster that
needs our attention right now.
The longer we wait, the greater the risk, these kids will wind up
suffering for years and years to come.
Without an effective national strategy to help children who have
lost caregivers to Covid, families around the country are making do
as best they can.
-There are things that we know work, and work well, that minimize
the impact of these traumas.
Having connections, being connected to someone else,
a teacher, a coach, a family member, may help you navigate a loss
such as that.
-What’s funny? What’s funny?
Over six months have passed since Avion’s mom died.
Two years before that, in 2019, Avion’s stepfather died.
Now, Avion helps care for his siblings, who have
moved in with their grandmother.
But there wasn’t room for Avion, so he lives now with his best friend’s
family nearby.
-They’re strong and smart babies.
But, yeah, I have noticed changes in them.
Mo, she gets sad sometimes.
She’ll call me and I’ll just talk to her at night.
She just says, ‘I miss Mama’ and stuff like that.
And I just tell her I miss her too.
And I just talk to her about, like, how her day went and stuff, and get
her off the topic and make her, like, go to sleep.
- Do you want salad, bub?
- Uh-uh, I’m fine. Thank you.
C.J. and Momo started seeing a counselor at school, who helps
them work through their grief.
Avion turns to his friends and working out.
-When I get like, really, like, like to like, explode, I just go to the gym
and let it out with working out.
It’s somewhere where I feel safe.
Football, it’s another getaway place.
I, I can just let loose and I don’t have to think about anything.
I just play my game and do what I need to do.
Avion is going to college next year, fulfilling a dream he and
his mother shared.
Then, he plans to return home, get an apartment,
and raise C.J. and Momo.
-I put this photo on my lockscreen.
So I could wake up in the morning and see her face every day.
Really. And it keeps me motivated, keeps me going.
If I have to struggle for a little bit for them to be, for them to have
what they want, that’s what I’m going to do, because that’s what my
mom and dad did for me when I was growing up.
I just want them to be happy and not have to worry
about anything else the rest of their lives.