Welcome to a CEDAR seminar with Anna Baranowska-Rataj & Björn Högberg
Effects of parental job loss on children’s mental health: the role of latency, timing and cumulative effects.
Crossover effects of critical life events within families have received growing attention in life-course research. A parent losing a job is among the most distressing events that can befall a family, but existing research has reached discrepant conclusions concerning if, and if so how, this affects child mental health. Drawing on insights from models of intra-family influence and life course epidemiological models, we ask if parental job loss have latent or long-term effects on child mental health, if the effects are conditional on the timing of the job loss, and if repeated job losses have cumulative effects.
We use intergenerationally linked Swedish register data combined with entropy balance and structural nested mean models for the analyses. The data allow us to track 400,000 children over 14 years and thereby test different life-course models of cross-over effects, and to identify involuntary job losses using information on workplace closures, thus reducing the risk of confounding.
Results show that paternal but not maternal job loss significantly increases the risk of mental health problems among children, that the average effects are modest in size (less than 4% in relative terms), that they materialize only after some years, and that they are driven by children aged 6-10 years. Moreover, we find evidence of cumulative effects, but also of declining marginal harm of additional job losses over the life course.
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The seminar will take place in the conference room at CEDAR and via zoom. Link will be sent out within CEDAR, other interested should contact Mojgan Padyab.
