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Too Young – The Legacy of Childhood Parental Bereavement
Date: 10/09/2026
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Venue: Newtown Community Centre – Te Whare Hapori o Ngā Puna Waiora Colombo Street &, Rintoul Street, Newtown, Wellington 6021
By the age of 18, an estimated 5% of Aotearoa’s tamariki will have had a parent die. Some will have lost both parents. What legacy does that leave? In this talk, Lee-Anne Duncan shares what her 75 interviews with adults who were bereaved as children has taught her about how all parents – but especially those facing death – can prepare their children ahead of time, and for after they’ve gone. Also, she will speak about a parent’s most enduring legacy – the legacy of love.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER:
Lee-Anne Duncan
When Lee-Anne Duncan was eight years old, her mother told her she was going to die. A few months later, just before Christmas, and just after Lee-Anne turned nine, she did. A Wellington-based journalist and writer, Lee-Anne is using her experience of losing a mother at a young age, along with other New Zealanders’ stories, to create a book and website (www.tooyoung.org.nz) that gives voice to a child’s experience of parental death and its impacts. Lee-Anne’s book will be published later this year. As well as helping others who lost their parents young find comfort, Lee-Anne’s focus is on how we – as parents, family and friends, and as a society – can mitigate some of the harms from early parental loss. Her book, she hopes, will help us “do death” better for children – in short, using lived experience to suggest ways we might “make a terrible situation slightly less terrible”. Many of her interviewees didn’t feel equipped to address their grief until their middle years, and spoke to Lee-Anne of their wish to have had “the tools, the language” much younger to share their feelings, to ask for help. This has spurred Lee-Anne to push for grief literacy to be taught in schools, so the next generation of New Zealanders understand grief and bereavement, know how to ask for help, and how to support others.
RSVP and questions to [email protected]
