Impact of Parental Death in Middle Childhood and Adolescence on Child Outcomes

Abstract

This paper investigates whether the death of a parent during middle childhood (ages 7-8 to 11-12) has different effects on a child's schooling and psychosocial outcomes when compared with death during adolescence (ages 11-12 to 14-15) in Ethiopia. The data come from three rounds of the Young Lives longitudinal survey, conducted in 2002, 2006 and 2009, of a sample of around 850 children across 20 sentinel sites in Ethiopia. The results show that when a child's mother dies in middle childhood, it has a significantly negative impact on school enrolment. A parent's death also has a significant negative impact on a child's sense of optimism about the future. These effects are short term in nature and do not persist into adolescence. However, the children orphaned in middle childhood engage in significantly more paid employment and self-employment at age 14-15. In contrast to maternal death in middle childhood, maternal death in adolescence has no impacts on any of the outcomes considered in our sample. However, the death of a father in adolescence has a significant negative impact on school enrolment, maths scores and a child's sense of agency. It is unclear as to why this is the case, as these orphans do not seem to engage in more employment than others and there have been no significant disruption to caregiver arrangements. It is likely that the † I would like to thank Stefan Dercon, John Strauss, Adrian Wood and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. All errors are mine.

Factors associated with general self-efficacy and resilience among youth heads of households in Kenya

“…This finding is similar to that found in Himaz (2013) that maternal orphans showed lower self-esteem than non-orphans in Ethiopia. Unlike Himaz (2013), this study did not find age at parental death associated with self-efficacy. Furthermore, maternal orphans showed significantly lower Q1 GSE than did paternal orphans but showed no significant difference from double or nonorphans at any level of GSE or resilience.…”

How Inequalities Develop through Childhood

“…Unsurprisingly there was a negative impact on children's sense of optimism when a parent died during the child's middle childhood. The deaths of mothers at that point were also associated with reduced school enrolment, and with children doing more paid work by the age of 15 years (Himaz, 2013; also see Heissler and Porter, 2013). By contrast, the death of a mother during the child's adolescence produced less observable impacts on education, while the death of the father was associated with reductions in enrolment, test scores, and sense of agency (Himaz, 2013).…”

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