Early Parental Death and Its Unequal Impact on Children’s Educational Success: Evidence from a Stratified Educational System

Yuxuan Jin , Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute-KNAW/University of Groningen
Matthijs Kalmijn, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Research Institute NIDI/University of Groningen
Helga A. G. De Valk, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI-KNAW), University of Groningen

Early parental death is a traumatic life course event for children. Research has shown that early parental death has negative effects on children’s education. Less is known about heterogeneity in the effect of early parental death on children’s education. Moreover, prior studies mostly focus on the Nordic countries, so less is known about the early parental death penalty in other countries. In this paper, we examine whether parental socio-economic status and migration background are associated with early parental death and whether the early parental death penalty on children’s educational success varies by parental socio-economic status and migration background. We use administrative data of the Netherlands, enriched with data on children’s academic test scores and educational transitions by tracks (1994-2022). The Netherlands is unique in that it has a stratified educational system with early tracking. This allows us to study the timing of parental death in relation to specific educational transitions, thereby obtaining more direct evidence on the way parental death affects children’s success in school. Preliminary findings show that 4.1% of children born between 1994 and 2010 experienced parental death before age 28 (N = 122,142). Using discrete-time event history models, we find children with tertiary-educated parents and non-EU migration backgrounds are less likely to experience parental death. Using linear probability models, we find children over age 23 who experienced parental death before had a lower probability of attaining tertiary education than those children who did not. Detailed analyses of educational transitions will be presented in the full paper.

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 Presented in Session 79. Till Death (or Divorce) do us Part