The Childhood Cost of Mid-Life Mortality: Parental Death and Adolescent Outcomes

Sociologists have extensively studied family instability and its childhood consequences, focusing principally on family instability resulting from parental separation and parental incarceration. Children’s exposure to another source of family instability—early life parental death—has received scant attention. This article extends research on the childhood consequences of family instability by considering the prevalence and consequences of parental death using Future of Families and Child Wellbeing (FFCWS) data. Results show that by age 15, 13% of the FFCWS cohort had experienced a parent’s death, with an additional 3% of children’s father’s vital status unknown. Results show that having ever experienced parental death is associated with depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms at age 15, with some evidence that the associations are pronounced among boys. Fixed-effects models using pre- and post-death measures further show that parental death between ages 9 and 15 corresponds with increases in children’s depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and delinquent behavior. Place-based instability around the time of parental death explains children’s worsening outcomes, which aligns with a social trajectory model of parental death. Together, the results demonstrate parental death is a relatively common and notably consequential childhood experience that can set children on disadvantaged trajectories.