Parental Death in Childhood and Family-Life Transitions in 21 Countries

Yuxuan Jin , Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute
Matthijs Kalmijn, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute
Helga de Valk, NIDI

Parental death in childhood is known to have adverse consequences for children’s education and mental health outcomes. Yet, less is known about how it affects later family-life transitions. Our study examines how parental death before age 18 affects three key transitions to adulthood: leaving home, forming a first partnership, and entering parenthood. We focus on whether the effects of parental death vary by the deceased parent’s gender and the country context. We derive hypotheses from three theoretical perspectives regarding the economic resource, the household resource, and the quality. Using retrospective data from the Generations and Gender Survey across 21 European countries, we analyzed 154,575 children, of whom 7,432 children lost their father and 2,318 children lost their mother before age 18. We use discrete-time event-history models at the individual level and meta-regression models at the country level. Our results show that children who experienced early parental death were more likely to leave home and form a first partnership earlier than those who did not, but no accelerating effect for entering parenthood. In line with the household resource and quality perspectives, mother’s death had a stronger accelerating effect on home-leaving than father’s death. Moreover, the effects of mother’s death on home-leaving were weaker in countries with more egalitarian gender norms, supporting the household resource perspective. In contrast with the economic resource perspective, the effects of father’s death on family-life transitions were not weaker in countries with more social security and higher female labor force participation rates.

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 Presented in Session 106. Flash Session Becoming an Adult in the 21st Century