Short Lives, the Impact of Parental Death on Early Life Mortality and Height in the Netherlands 1850-1940

Björn Quanjer, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Matthias Rosenbaum-Feldbrügge, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Ingrid K van Dijk, Lund University

Parental death in childhood is a dramatic event which has been associated with decreasing living standards and a decline in access to parental care and socioeconomic resources. In the current work, we investigate how the death of a parent early in life affects males children's well-being by analyzing two distinct measures of health: Child mortality and young adult height. This enables us to identify critical age periods when sudden childhood adversities were most harmful and to gain more insights into the biodemographic processes and mechanisms at play. We use data provided by the Historical Sample of the Netherlands and employ survival methods in the mortality analysis and linear regression models in the height analysis. The results reveal that height is mainly affected by parental death taking place within the ages 5 and 12. Maternal death and paternal death in this age period, however, have opposing effects with maternal death being negatively and paternal death being positively associated with height. Childhood mortality, in contrast, is strongly affected by parental death and particularly maternal death in infancy. Remarkably, also a father’s death between the ages 5 and 12 is associated with elevated mortality risks. Our results show that mortality and height measure different aspects of well-being and therefore operate during different age periods. Moreover, maternal death is generally more harmful to children’s well-being thereby indicating that the loss of resources traditionally provided by mothers is worse than the loss of resources provided by fathers.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 79. Family, Fertility, and Mortality