consider yourself lucky. if the parent dies, many times the young child dies also. unless they were living with both parents and only 1 died.
in the beginning,it is easy to build houses as there are graduating or child bearing aged females. after a while,i build a house for every 2 adults.remember the boardinghouse counts as 1 house. so if there is 20 working adults and you built a boardinghouse,you want 11 houses.
when nomads come,you can pause the game,accept the nomads,and unpause and repause the game quickly.pull up the boardinghouse and see how many are adults and how many are children.the adults will of course already be added to the laborer count as well. then you know how many new houses you need. building too many, can result in more children being born and more food and firewood being needed.