Emily Smith-Greenaway, University of Southern California

"The childhood cost of mid-life mortality: Parental death in the United States"

March 24, 2025
from 12:00 PM to 01:00 PM

"Vast social science literature demonstrate that children growing up in racially and socioeconomically marginalized families in the U.S. are more likely to experience a host of adversities and stressors in their early lives—from parental incarceration, chronic poverty, and housing instability to higher rates of police contact, intrapersonal violence, and parental separation. Yet, children’s exposure to one source of family adversity in the U.S. has been curiously overlooked: premature parental death. Although demographers often assume that exposure to parental death is too rare of a phenomenon to study in national samples of children in the U.S., recent research demonstrates that converging crises, including COVID-19, the opioid epidemic, gun violence, and ‘deaths of despair’ have given way to a rise in mid-life mortality, corresponding to concomitant rise in children’s exposure to parental death. In this talk, I will present results from the Future of the Families and Child Wellbeing data to offer a portrait of the burden of parental death as experienced by this cohort, and the consequences that it portends for multiple dimensions of their wellbeing and development. The results demonstrate the growing need to acknowledge parental death as a common and consequential childhood adversity in the United States."

Presented by the Maryland Population Research Center. More details and registration link on the MPRC website.