STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY
Dept of Sociology, Demography Unit / www.suda.su.se
Does Parental Death Affect Fertility?
A Register-Based Study of the Effect of Parental Death on Adult Children's
Childbearing Behavior in Sweden
Johan Dahlberg
Stockholm Research Reports
in Demography 2016: 01
© Copyright is held by the author(s). SRRDs receive only limited review. Views and opinions expressed in SRRDs are attributable to the authors and do not necessarily reflect those held at the Demography Unit.
Does Parental Death Affect Fertility? A Register-Based Study of the Effect of Parental Death on Adult Children's Childbearing Behavior in
Sweden
Johan Dahlberg
Stockholm University Demography Unit (SUDA)
Abstract: Even though fertility and mortality are two of demography’s most researched topics, no prior study has examined, at the micro level, whether parental death influences adult children’s fertility. Macro-level studies have shown that rapid increases in mortality can affect fertility rates in the aftermath. Parental death has also been linked to negative psychological and physical outcomes, reduced relationship quality, and making bereaved child attach more importance to family. This study applies event history analysis on Swedish multi-generation registers containing 1.5 million individuals linked to micro data on mortality and fertility to investigate both the short-term (first birth risk) and long- term (childlessness at age 45) effects of parental death on adult children's fertility. The principal finding is that parental death during reproductive age affects children’s fertility and this effect is mainly short-term. The effects differ to some degree between men and women and depend on when in the life course the bereavement happens.
1. Death is not the end
Mortality among elderly people outnumbers all other types of deaths (Riley 2001; Vaupel 2010). As a consequence, the most likely death adults will experience is the death of a parent (Uhlenberg 1980; Watkins et al. 1987). Together with having children and getting married, the death of a parent is considered one of life’s most critical events (Berntsen and Rubin 2004), which requires significant readjustment (Holmes and Rahe 1967).
Even though fertility and mortality are two of demography’s most researched topics, no prior study has examined, at the micro level, whether parental death influences adult children’s fertility. Macro-level studies on the demographic consequences of rapid increases in mortality due to wars or other external factors have often reported increased fertility rates in the aftermath of these events (e.g. Caldwell 2004; Nobles et al. 2015), suggesting that deaths in one’s social network can affect fertility. However, these findings are based both on macro-level associations and extreme events, and thus not necessarily generalizable to the experience of parental death at the individual level and under normal conditions.
Most research on the effects of parental death on adult children shows that it increases stress levels and makes them more vulnerable to both psychological and physical diseases (e.g. Marks et al. 2007; Perkins and Harris 1990). Research on
psychological stress and fertility has shown a weak, yet consistently negative impact of stress on the likelihood to conceive for women (e.g. Matthiesen et al. 2011). Adult children who experience a parental death are more likely to report difficulties getting along with other people (Scharlach 1991) and reduced relationship quality (Umberson
1995). Experiencing a parental death can also make the bereaved child attach more importance to family (Vail et al. 2012).
These pieces of evidence together suggest that parental mortality can affect fertility, and it is therefore somewhat surprising that this possibility has not been previously analyzed. One reason for this can be that such analysis requires large multigenerational data with accurate information on both mortality and fertility. The Swedish multigenerational registers provide a unique opportunity for such a study.
I use Swedish multi-generation registers and 1.5 million individuals linked to micro data on mortality and fertility to investigate both the short-term (first birth risk) and long-term (childlessness at age 45) effects of parental death on adult children's fertility.
Furthermore, I assess whether these effects depend on the age and gender of the bereaved child, the gender of the parent, and whether the parental death could be regarded as anticipated or not.
2. Death of a parent
The lion's share of research on the effects of parental death focuses on children of preschool or school age, when parental death is relatively uncommon (Watkins et al.
1987; Harrison and Harrington 2001). Overall, the psychological outcomes among children who experience the death of a parent are heterogeneous (e.g. Dowdney 2000).
The effect of parental death during adulthood has received much less attention. On the
al. 1984; Watkins and Menken 1985), major political upheaval or armed conflicts (Lindstrom and Berhanu 1999; Agadjanian and Prata 2002; Blanc 2004; Heuveline and Poch 2007), natural disasters (Cohan and Cole 2002; Cohan 2010; Nobles et al. 2015), and terrorist attacks (Rodgers et al. 2005; Cohan 2010). However, even if results are mixed, most studies report increased fertility rates post-crisis, exceeding the pre-shock levels (e.g. Caldwell 2004; Heuveline and Poch 2007).
A reason why the effects of parental death during adulthood have received little attention can be that it is considered a more normal event - compared to macro-level shocks and to parental death during childhood - and therefore less likely to have any serious impact. However, for an absolute majority of people the relationship between parent and child is one of high emotional closeness, even in adulthood (Carstensen 1992;
Bengtson 2001; Birditt et al. 2009). It is therefore not surprising that parents' deaths are regarded a critical life course event (Berntsen and Rubin 2004) that requires considerable readjustment (Holmes and Rahe 1967; Holmes 1978).
The existing literature on the effects of parental death suggests three pathways concerning how parental death can affect adult children’s fertility. These pathways concern the effects of parental death on psychological and physical well-being and interpersonal relationships, on values and life goals, and on the physiological possibility to conceive. First, the death of a parent can lead to deep and prolonged emotional turmoil and a reduced quality of personal relationships. These can reduce both the willingness and opportunity to have children. Clinical studies on the impact of parental death on adult children’s well-being have shown that grief following a parental death can lead to
depression, suicidal thoughts, and other psychiatric problems (Birtchnell 1975; Sanders,
1979; Horowitz et al., 1981; McHorney and Mor, 1988). A limitation of these studies is that most have only included small non-representative samples of people after their experience of a parental death. Research that used more representative samples has linked parental death to sleeping disorders (Scharlach 1991), depression (Moss et al. 1993), psychological distress, increased alcohol consumption (Umberson and Chen 1994), death anxiety (Florian, Mikulincer, and Green 1994), and lower life satisfaction (Leopold and Lechner 2015).
Parental death can also reduce the ability to get along with other people (Scharlach 1991). Importantly, it can lower relationship quality, especially in couples with low problem solving skills (Conger and Bradbury 1997; Conger et al. 1999), and in the absence of support from the non-bereaved partner (Umberson 1994; 2003). Douglas (1991) suggests that parental death and marital problems may be interrelated as the death of the parent can lead to confusion in relationships and self-image. Umberson (2003) argues that especially adults who had critical or judgmental parents can feel liberated by the parents death and feel free to change in new directions (e.g. to divorce). However, the impact of union dissolution on childbearing is not necessarily negative. Thomson and colleagues (2012) have shown that even if opportunities for conceiving and bearing children are fewer when unions are dissolved, union instability can produces a pool of persons who may enter new partnerships and have children.
Research on the effect of parental death on adult children’s physical health
Swedish register data, Rostila and Saarela (2011) found results that indicate that adult offspring experience a reduced mortality risk after a parental death.
A second potential pathway from parental death to fertility is a reassessment of one’s life goals towards more family-oriented values and self-identity. The experience of a parental death is, compared to other deaths, different in two important ways. First, parents are the most influential people in shaping the child’s sense of self (Cantor and Zirkel 1990). Second, adults continue to define themselves as children up until their parents die, at which point they are forced to redefine themselves as only being adults (Umberson 2003). Several studies have emphasized that the death of a parent is a highly significant event for adult children by being a clear reminder of the child’s own finity (Kastenbaum 1977; Moss and Moss 1984; Douglas 1991; Scharlach and Fredriksen 1993;
Klapper, Moss & Moss, 1994; Moss, Resch & Moss, 1997; Bower 1997; Petersen &
Rafuls, 1998; Marshall 2004). A parental death not only means that the adult child has lost a parent, but also a family structure (Umberson 2003; Holmes and Rahe 1967;
Holmes 1978).
Experiencing a parental death may shift preferences away from extrinsic goals, such as wealth and status, and towards intrinsic goals, such as personal relationships and family (Vail et al. 2012). It can change the bereaved child’s sense of maturity and the importance of social relationships (Scharlach and Fredriksen 1993). Research on fertility in response to macro shocks argues that fertility takes on a symbolic meaning after a population trauma. Births are seen as a way of “returning to normal” after a disturbance of the usual order (Bower 1997; Carta et al. 2012; Rodgers et al. 2005). Some researchers have argued that a renewed investment in family will emerge as a response to the
increased awareness of one's own and others' frailty (Fritsche et al. 2007; Nakonezny, Reddick, and Rodgers 2004). In psychological research the term posttraumatic growth refers to positive psychological change after experiencing a struggle with highly challenging life circumstances (Calhoun & Tedeschi 1998; 2001).
A third possible pathway through which parental death could affect the adult child's fertility is by reducing the physical ability to have children. Psychological distress has in most cases been shown to have a weak negative impact on women’s possibility to conceive (Segraves 1998; Matthiesen 2011), while emotional stress as a single factor behind male infertility has in most cases been rejected (Sheiner et. al 2003). Severe stress may nevertheless have a small negative impact on men's fecundability (Slade et al. 1992;
Clarke et al. 1999; Hjollund et al. 2004). Relatedly, studies on distress and fetal loss have shown mixed results (Neugebauer et al. 1996; Hamilton Boyles et al. 2000; Zhu et al.
2004; Wainstock et al. 2013), whereas psychosocial stress during pregnancy have been shown to increase the risk of stillbirth (László et al. 2013).
However, it is very unlikely that any negative effect of stress on fecundity would lead to a detectable effect, even with very large data. First, the evidence of a sudden drop in the physical ability to produce children due to stress is both weak and highly disputed.
Second, people are able to control and make deliberate choices about having children (Goldin & Katz 2002), and it is unlikely that any small changes in fecundity would generate any significant change in fertility rates.
Moderating factors – timing, age, gender and anticipation
The effect of parental death on fertility can be time-dependent, both with respect to short-term and long-term effects, and to the stage of the life course in which it occurs.
It is likely that any impact of parental death on offspring’s fertility can be different at different life stages and under different circumstances. Previous research provides strong motives to consider timing, age, gender, and if the parental death is unexpected or
anticipated, when studying a potential impact of parental death on adult children's childbearing behavior.
The social meaning of an event depends on its timing in relation to normative and cultural expectations of the sequencing of important life transitions (Hogan 1981;
Modell 1980; Elder 1998). The death of an elderly parent is generally regarded as a normative, on-time life event both by parent-bereaved adult children and society at large (Klapper et al. 1994). On the other hand, non-normative and off-time events—which in life course theory are generally regarded as major, unexpected and unpredictable events that do not follow a predictable life pattern (Neugarten & Hagestad 1976), such as losing a parent relatively early in life—can induce major stress and life changes (Rook et al., 1989; Douglas 1991).
Relatedly, the death of a parent can be unexpected or anticipated. Akin to parental deaths that are off-time from the viewpoint of the general sequencing of life courses, deaths that are unexpected increase the likelihood of grief complications (Parkes, 1976; Doka 1996; Stroebe & Schut, 2001; Clements & Burgess, 2002), psychiatric
morbidity (Lundin 1984), prolonged physical stress (Sanders 1983), and increased risk of feelings of unfairness, disbelief, and anger (DeRanieri et al., 2002; Walsh, 2007).
Similarly, the effects of unexpected or off-time parental bereavement can have stronger effects of filial fertility behavior compared to parental deaths that were anticipated and experienced later in life.
Gender moderates many of the impacts of parental death on adult children.
Almost all research on intergenerational transmission shows that women are more affected by their family of origin than men (see Dahlberg (2013) for an overall estimate of the importance of family of origin for men's and women's fertility). Gender has a double meaning in the current study as both the gender of the bereaved child and the gender of the deceased parent can moderate the impact of parental death on fertility. The results regarding these moderating effects are somewhat conflicting. Moss and colleagues (1997) and Umberson and Chen (1994) found that daughters were more affected by parental deaths than sons were, whereas Marks and colleagues (2007) reported the opposite regarding effects on physical health. With respect to the parents’ gender, Umberson & Chen (1994) and Umberson (2003) found that losing a mother is more traumatic than the death of a father, while Marks et al. (2007) concludes that the father’s death leads to more negative effects for sons and a mother’s death leads to more negative effects for daughters.
3. DATA AND METHOD
The data were extracted from the Swedish population register, which covers the entire Swedish population and its vital events with very high accuracy. The multigenerational register makes it possible to link everyone born after 1932 to their biological and/or adoptive parents. This study included all Swedish-born individuals born between 1946 and 1962 whose both biological parents could be identified. The cohorts were chosen based on two criteria. First, the cohort members should be observable at least up to age 45 to enable analysis of the effects of parental death on permanent childlessness
(especially true for women). Second, by including the 1946 birth cohort as the oldest cohort, the numbers of missing values for all used variables is sufficiently low. This is especially important regarding information on biological parents. Adopted children were excluded because adoption makes it difficult to determine which parents (biological or adoptive) matter more. Those with foreign-born parents were excluded because there is often an under-registration of mortality among immigrants in official mortality statistics due to re-emigration at higher ages (Weitoft et al. 1999). A small number of individuals who experienced the parental death of both parents before the age of 15 were also excluded from the analysis. 1,500,508 individual met these criteria. Table 1 presents the characteristics of the study population.
Table 1 Descriptive statistics
Variable Percent (%)
Cohort
1946 6.92
1947 6.73
1948 6.61
1949 6.33
1950 6.05
1951 5.76
1952 5.80
1953 5.80
1954 5.55
1955 5.64
1956 5.66
1957 5.59
1958 5.53
1959 5.51
1960 5.36
1961 5.52
1962 5.65
Education (at age 45)
ISCED 0-2 – No education, primary level, lower secondary level. 56.87
ISCED 3-4 - Upper secondary level or post-secondary non-tertiary education.
26.52
ISCED 5-6 – first or second stage of tertiary education. 16.61
Parents EGP (highest of both parents)
Unskilled workers 26.74
Skilled workers 22.39
Farmers, fishermen 5.04
Self-employed 6.85
Routine non-manual 10.89
Lower service class 17.26
Upper service class 7.02
Unknown 3.80
Parental deaths
No parental dead while under risk of having a first child 82.10
One parental dead while under risk of having a first child 15.15
Two parental deaths while under risk of having a first child 2.75
Number of siblings Mean 1.8 SD 1.48
Mothers age at first birth Mean 27.6 SD 5.84
00 Total number of individuals 1 532 918
Left censored cases (death, birth or emigration before age 18) 38 242
Total analysis time (half years) at risk 36 298 705
The dependent variable was having the first child, and the individuals in the data were followed from age 18 until the first birth or death, their emigration, or age 45, which were the right-censoring events. The main independent variables were the parents’ deaths.
Information on parents’ deaths and causes of death were extracted from the Swedish Cause of Death Register. International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 7 to 10 were used create categories of Unexpected and Anticipated Deaths, where accidents as a cause of death (ICD10: V01–X59) were treated as unexpected. Although this study uses a large data, the number of observations experiencing a second parental death during their reproductive age was too small to include an interaction between the propensity to have children and the cause of a second parent’s death. Time since a parental death was included as a time-varying variable, indicating parental deaths that occurred 0-5 months ago, 6-11 months ago, 12-17 months ago, 1.5-5 years ago, or more than five years ago.
The intervals were selected based on the results of previous research concerning the effect of parents' death on various filial outcomes (e.g., Umberson and Chen 1994;
Scharlach 1991; Leopold & Lechner 2012) and should capture both immediate as well as intermediate effects.
Because social background affects both the child’s age at becoming a parent (Dahlberg 2015) and the probability of experiencing a parental death during reproductive age (Kesteloot 2003), information on the parents' social class (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992) was included in the analysis. Previous research has shown that of the three dimensions of class – occupational class, occupational status, and education – education has the greatest impact on mortality (Erikson & Torssander 2008) as well as on the inter- generational influence on fertility (Dahlberg 2013; 2015). Information on parental
education for these cohorts was inadequate due to a large share of missing values, and parental education was therefore not included. Information on parents' occupations was extracted from the Swedish population censuses and coded into occupational classes (EGP) using the highest occupational class of the parents (Erikson 1984).
Torssander (2013) reported that in addition to the parents’ own education and other socioeconomic resources, their children’s education has an independent association with health and longevity. The educational level of the child at the end of reproductive age (age 45) was therefore controlled by classifying educational levels into three categories corresponding to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED): lower secondary education or less (ISCED categories 0–2), upper secondary education (3–4) and post-secondary education (5–6). Individuals with an unknown educational level were coded as having the lowest level of education. Index person’s mother's age at first birth and number of siblings—important components of
intergenerational transmission of fertility (e.g. Murphy 1999; Dahlberg 2013; 2015)—
were also adjusted for. Calendar year was used to control for period effects.
Analytical strategy
Event history analyses were used to study how parental deaths influence children’s fertility after a parent’s death. I applied event-history techniques to model the transition to the first birth by estimating proportional hazards models (e.g. Hoem 1993), where the
where is the baseline intensity, representing the piecewise constant effect of time since the eighteenth birthday as half-year duration intervals (18 to 45). Parental deaths were included as a time-varying variable, indicating the time since the first or second parents' death. The estimated relative risks (RR) with 95 % confidence interval (CI) were adjusted for parent’s class, mother’s age at first birth, number of siblings, educational attainment, and calendar year. For descriptive purposes, I estimated the survival function (still childless) at age 45 (together with the 95 % confidence intervals) for those who experienced a parental death and those who did not (cf. Bernardi 2001). All results are reported separately for men and women.
4. RESULTS
I begin by reporting some descriptive results. I then report the risk of childlessness if one experiences a parental death before having a first child, followed by the short- and intermediate time effect of parental death on first birth risk. I end by reporting some results when including the suggested moderating factors.
Figure 1 shows the proportion of individuals who have both, one or neither parent alive at different ages. In this study, individuals are followed from age 18, when 95 % have both parents alive, up to age 45 when this share had decreased to 45 %. Between the same ages, the proportion that has neither parent alive increased from close to zero (at age 18) to about 15 % (at age 45).
Figure 2 shows the proportion of women and men who are childless at ages 15 to 60. For the purposes of this graph, I followed all cohorts as far as the existing data allows. The youngest birth cohort (born 1962) in this study could not be followed beyond age 45, while the oldest cohort (born in 1946) could be followed up to age 60. The proportion of women who became a mother before age 18 (and left-censored in the subsequent
analyses) was just below 4 %. The proportion of men who became a father before age 18 was lower than 1 %. Close to 85 % of all women and 80 % of all men in the studied population became parents by age 45. The proportion that became parents after age 45, at which age I stopped following the observations, is very small. For women, the change in the fraction of being childless is close to zero after age 45. For men, it is possible to see a small decline after age 45, meaning that permanent childlessness should be slightly less rigorously interpreted. Overall, we can conclude from Figures 1 and 2 that the life course stages during which the studied cohorts experienced parental deaths and the entry into parenthood often overlapped. This of course does not yet mean that one would have any effect on the other.
Table 2 - Risk of childlessness (age 45) by parental death, men and women born 1946-62.
Parental death Both parents alive1 P 95% CI
One parent deceased2 P 95% CI
Both parents deceased3 P 95% CI Men 20.59% (20.47-20.72) 24.43% (24.28-24.58) 26.93% (26.66-27.21) Women 14.28% (14.17-14.39) 16.09% (15.97-16.21) 16.49% (16.26-16.72)
1) Both parents alive while under risk of a first birth.
2) Experienced a first parental death while under risk of a first birth.
3) Experienced the second parental death while under risk of a first birth.
Table 2 shows the overall probability of remaining childless at age 45 if losing one of both parents. For both men and women, experiencing a parental death is associated with a higher probability of childlessness, but this association is clearer for men. Approximately 14 % of women whose parents both survived until the end of the follow-up were childless at age 45, and the corresponding number for bereaved women was around 16 %. On the other hand, whereas 21 % of men who did not lose a parent were childless at 45, over 24
% of men who lost one parent, and 27 % of those who lost both parents were childless at age 45.
Table 3 shows the effect of a first parental death on the relative risk of becoming a parent. As already mentioned, previous research (e.g Elder 1998) has argued that the same event can have different implications for individuals depending on when in life it occurs. Because preliminary analysis showed that the impact of parental death turned out to be different at different ages, the results are reported for four different age groups – 18- 23, 24-30. 31-37, and 38-45 years of age. Experiencing a parental death between ages 18 and 23 increases the first birth risk immediately after the parent dies (although the increase is not significant for men) and this effect persists even after 5 years since the parental death. For women, the increased risk peaks 12-17 months after the parental death (RR: 1.14; 95% CI: 1.08–1.20), whereas for men it remains steadily higher from 6
months to 5 years after the bereavement. By contrast, losing a parent at older ages generally lowers the risk of entering parenthood. This is most visible among men
Interestingly, this age cut-off corresponds almost exactly with Leopold and Lechner’s (2015) separation between off-time and on-time events. They define life course
transitions as off-time when less than 10 % of the population has experienced a transition.
In this population, the 10 % threshold for experiencing a parental death is at age 23; the results in Table 3 can thus be interpreted as indicating the an “off-time” parental death increases the first birth rate, whereas bereavements that happen “on-time” have the opposite effect.
Most of the estimates of the effects of losing the second parent are not
significant. Losing the second parent already before age 24 is followed by a very strong immediate increase in intensity of becoming a parent, although the effects are only significant for women. On the other hand, those who are in their 30s or older when their second parent dies are less likely to enter parenthood, although caution in interpreting the estimates is warranted due to the few statistically significant effects.
Further analysis of the two remaining moderating factors discussed above (gender of the parent and whether the parental death was unexpected or anticipated) revealed that the gender of the (first) deceased parent does not shape the effects of bereavement of entry into parenthood (not shown). Neither did it matter for the first birth risk if the first parental death was unexpected or anticipated. Finally, interaction terms between parental death and social background, and parental death and number of siblings were not
5. DISCUSSION
The principal finding is that parental death during reproductive age affects children’s fertility and this effect is mainly short-term. The effects differ to some degree between men and women and depend on when in the life course the bereavement happens.
During the first quarter of the reproductive age, a parental death is associated with an increase in the first birth risks for both women and men, whereas at older ages losing a parent is associated with a decrease in the first birth risk. The results concerning the effects of parental death on the first birth rate appear generally similar for women and men. However, the descriptive results shows that men’s probability of being childless at age 45 is more affected by parental bereavement than that of women. Additionally, men who lost both of their parents are even more likely to be childless at age 45 than men who lost only one parent, whereas no additional effect of a second parental death can be found for women.
The results from previous research on the impact of parental death on men and women showed mixed results, although most research showed that women were more negatively affected than men. That men's probability of childlessness is affected more strongly by a parental death than women’s is therefore somewhat surprising. These results are further surprising given that almost all studies on intergenerational demographic processes have shown that women are more affected than men by their family of origin (Booth and Edwards, 1989; Amato and Keith 1991; Amato 1996;
Aronson 1992; Dahlberg 2013; 2015). A possible reason for why women’s probability of being childless is less affected by parental death might be that the full effect of parental
death is complex and perhaps over time pushes the child’s fertility in more than one direction. As Umberson (2003) has pointed out, most adult children who experience a parental death do not get severely depressed for a long time. Instead, most bereaved adult children accept that the parent has died and eventually move on with their lives. Although women are more likely to suffer from depression after a parental death, they can also have better coping skills and be more likely to seek social support (Thoits 1995) or help if necessary (Möller-Leimkühler 2002) and be able to move on after the period of grief.
Research on coping strategies usually distinguished between problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies, where problem-focused strategies seek to remove the stressor from the environment, and emotion-focused strategies are those that seek to ease the stressor by emotional responses (Lazarus & Folkman 1984). Most research reports that men are more likely than women to engage in “problem focused” coping strategies while women are more likely to engage in emotion focused coping strategies (Thoits 1991; Thoits 1995). Researchers have argued that the “emotion focused” coping strategy is more useful than the “problem focused” coping strategy when the problem is not open to a solution (Borden & Berlin, 1990; Lazarus 1993; Lazarus 1996). Since parental death is not something that can be fixed or undone, the "emotion focused" coping strategy can be better than the “problem focused” one in dealing with parental death. Another
potential explanation why women’s fertility is less affected by a parental death, can be the adoption of traditional gender roles as a way to handle the trauma, which can lead
family obligations, are more likely to maintain family bonds, and are most involved in assistance and caregiving (Logan & Spitze 1996; Lye, 1996; Moen 1996; Silverstein &
Bengtson, 1997; Pillemer and Suitor 2002).
It is difficult to determine whether the increased fertility among those aged 18 to 23 are an effect of age or an effect of the event occurring off-time, because the youngest age group and the definition of off-time almost completely overlap. It is also difficult to determine whether this increase is a manifestation of a shift towards more intrinsic goals in life or a compensation for the reduction in number of social contacts (social isolation perspective). There was no significant interaction effect between number of siblings and parents’ death. If the effect of a parental death had been different for individuals with no siblings compared to those with many siblings it could perhaps indicate that it is a shift towards more intrinsic goals that cause a young adult child's first birth risk to increase following the death of a parent.
Since this study shows that parental death, depending on age and gender of the adult child, can affect the first birth risk immediately after a parental death, it can be tempting to want to study how the first birth risk is affected before the parent dies (for example, in anticipation of the parental death). However, including such measurement in the analysis would be to condition on future events, which could lead to incorrect results.
Following the arguments and recommendations by Hoem and Kreyenfeld (2006a; 2006b) and Kravdal (2004) on risk of anticipatory analysis, no separate first birth risk was
estimated prior to a parental death. Also, it is impossible to know when this anticipation starts.
An alternative explanation is of course selection. Even if few empirical studies exist (Wickrama et al. 1999) that investigates an intergenerational transmission of health- related behaviors such as poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking, and excessive alcohol use, it is not strange to assume that certain behaviors may exist that are inherited across generations and that could be confounding factors affecting both parents' mortality and the adult child's chances on the marriage market and the propensity to become a parent.
Umberson (2003) argues that most adult children experiencing a parental death cope fairly well with the event and do not become severely depressed for longer periods of time. However, the results showing that bereaved adult children have significantly lower (age 18-23 for men and women) or higher (age 24-45 for men and age 31-37 for women) fertility rates than the baseline, more than five years after the parental death occurred, should raise the awareness that those most likely to experience a parental death do perhaps not follow the baseline fertility under normally circumstances, either. However, this argument does not mean that all deviation from the baseline could be explained by selection. It is not possible that the same section bias could cause the short-term effects of parental death on the first birth risk immediately after experiencing a parental death.
Thus, individuals who experience a parental death have an increased risk of having their transition to parenthood accelerated or postponed. As already shown, previous research has shown that both accelerated and postponed entry into parenthood can have negative consequences for both the child and the parent.
I thank Juho Härkönen, Gunnar Andersson, Sunnee Billingsley, Elizabeth Thomson, Robert Erikson, and Jane Menken for valuable comments and suggestions. The study benefited from discussion at the Population Association of America 2015 Annual Meeting. Financial support from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research for Working Life and Social research (Grant 2010-0831), the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) via the Swedish Initiative for Research on Microdata in the Social and Medical Sciences (SIMSAM): Stockholm University SIMSAM Node for Demographic Research (Grant Registration Number 340-2013-5164) and Linnaeus Center on Social Policy and Family Dynamics in Europe (SPaDE) (Grant 349-2007- 8701) is gratefully acknowledged
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