Skip to Main Content

COVID-19 Pandemic Children's Book Collection

Headshot of Ashley Hosbach smiling. Photograph.

Ashley Hosbach

Contact: aeh5mg@virginia.edu

Ashley is the Project Lead and University of Virginia’s Education & Social Science Research Librarian. Ashley specializes in children’s literature and is currently researching the COVID-19 pandemic and social emotional learning represented in picture books.

 

Headshot of Mary Lihong Peng smiling with a floral background behind her. Photograph.

Mary Lihong Peng

Mary served as the project's Social Emotional Learning Cataloger and Digital Support. She graduated from UVA in May 2021. She is currently an MPH Candidate at the Yale School of Public Health, with a focus on Digital Health, Psychosocial Epidemiology & Public Health Modeling.


Grief and Loss

In the United States we've lost over 900,000 people to the COVID-19 pandemic (Stein, 2022). Collectively, as a society, we are facing an unprecedented level of grief and loss. These deaths impact our children. Close to 200,000 American children are now orphans who lost parents or primary caregivers to the pandemic. Out of that number, fifty percent of caregiver loss was among elementary and middle-school age children (Treglia et al., 2022)The books in this section aim to serve as resources for counselors, educators, caregivers, social workers, and librarians supporting these children. They are mapped to the CASEL Framework for applying evidence-based SEL strategies.