Parental death during childhood and violent crime in late adolescence to early adulthood: a Swedish national cohort study

Abstract

Childhood parental death has been associated with adverse health, social and educational outcomes. Studies on long-term outcomes are in general scarce and there is little evidence on the long-term impact on antisocial behaviour. This study takes advantage of high-quality register data to investigate risk of violent crime in relation to childhood parental death in a large national cohort covering the entire Swedish population born in 1983-1993 (n = 1,103,656). The impact of parental death from external (suicides, accidents, homicides) and natural causes on risk for violent crime from age 15 to 20-30 years, considering multiple aspects of the rearing environment (including parental psychiatric disorders and criminal offending), was estimated through Cox regression. Unadjusted hazard ratios associated with parental death from external causes ranged between 2.20 and 3.49. For maternal and paternal death from external causes, adjusted hazard ratios were 1.26 (95% confidence intervals: 1.04-1.51) and 1.44 (95% confidence intervals: 1.32-1.57) for men, and 1.47 (95% confidence intervals: 1.05-2.06) and 1.51 (95% confidence intervals: 1.27-1.78) for women. With the exception of maternal death among women (hazard ratio 1.26, 95% confidence intervals: 1.03-1.53), parental death from natural causes was not associated with increased risks in adjusted models. The results underscore the importance of preventive interventions to prevent negative life-course trajectories, particularly when death is sudden and clustered with other childhood adversities.

Single-Parent Families and Adolescent Crime: Unpacking the Role of Parental Separation, Parental Decease, and Being Born to a Single-Parent Family

“…Price and Kunz (2003) conducted a meta-analysis about parental divorce; when studies used samples of younger children in comparison with studies with older children, they found larger criminogenic effect sizes. Berg et al (2019) did not find statistically significant differences between the age categories with regard to the child's age at the time of death of their parent.…”

“…Moreover, we did not find the expected difference in delinquency between children who experienced parental separation and children having one deceased biological parent. Since a study by Juby and Farrington (2001) found contradictory results depending on the method used to investigate the differences between parental separation and parental death, and a recent study by Berg et al (2019) found an increased risk of violent crime after experiencing a parental death, it is possible that the family crisis model is not valid, or is no longer valid.…”

“…Most of the studies on parental disruption (see Kroese et al, 2021) showed that children with separated parents were more likely to engage in delinquent behavior than children living with both biological parents (e.g., Spohn & Kurtz, 2011;Vanassche et al, 2014) and the remaining studies showed no differences between these families. A study by Berg et al (2019) on the effects of experiencing a parental death during childhood showed an increased risk of violent crime in adolescents. A study by Juby and Farrington (2001) found that families disrupted by separation were more criminogenic than families disrupted by parental death when looking at reports on juvenile convictions.…”

Parental death in childhood and pathways to increased mortality across the life course in Stockholm, Sweden: A cohort study

“…From a life-course perspective, particularly for males, our findings support the chain of risk model, that exposure is associated with the risk of subsequent negative events, and each of these factors are in turn associated with increased mortality risk [ 52 ]. The death of a parent during childhood is a traumatic and stressful life event and has been found to increase susceptibility to delinquent behaviour [ 21 , 24 ]. Those engaging in delinquent behaviour face a higher rate of negative life stressors and disrupted lives [ 33 , 53 ].…”

“…Childhood parental death is a traumatic and stressful life events and has been considered to disrupt the developmental trajectories and impair child’s ability to cope with adversity [ 18 ], potentially resulting in behavioural and emotional problems, such as misbehaviour and anger [ 19 ]. Indeed, parental death has been found to be associated with an increased rate of behavioural problems [ 20 ], delinquent behaviour [ 21 ], and externalizing problems [ 22 ], including substance abuse [ 23 ], violent crime [ 24 ], and risky sexual behaviour [ 20 ]. An increased risk for mental health problems in the surviving parent can relate to the quality of care that children receive following the death and thus have also implications for the child rearing environment [ 18 , 25 ].…”