Divorce And Parity Progression Following The Death Of A Child: A Register-based Study From Finland

Divorce And Parity Progression Following The Death Of A Child: A Register-based Study From Finland

Finnas F; Rostila M; Saarela J

10.1080/00324728.2017.1337918

Population Studies

2017

Child Death; Divorce; Finland; Parity Progression; Register Data

Most studies that have examined whether a child's death influences parental relationship stability have used small-scale data sets and their results are inconclusive. A likely reason is that child loss affects not only the risk of parental separation, but also the risk of having another child. Hence parity progression and separation must be treated as two competing events in relation to child loss. The analysis in this paper used Finnish register data from 1971 to 2003, covering over 100,000 married couples whose durations of both first marriage and parenthood could be observed. We ran parity-specific Cox regressions in which process time started from the birth of each additional child. All marriages included women of childbearing age, none of whom had experienced any child death on entering the analysis. We find that child loss only modestly influences the divorce risk, whereas its effect on the risk of parity progression is considerable.

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