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 anti-social 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.
Highlights
About 4% of all children in Sweden experience the death of a parent before their eighteenth birthday (Berg et al, 2016), and similar numbers are seen in other western countries (Parsons, 2011; Social Security Administration, 2000)
Deaths were classified according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) as deaths caused by natural causes, i.e., diseases (ICD-8 code: 0000–7969; ICD-9 code: 000–796; and ICD-10 code: A00-R99) or deaths caused by external causes, i.e., accidents, homicide or suicides (ICD-8 code: 8000–9999; ICD-9 code: 800–999; and ICD-10 code: V01-Y98)
Paternal deaths constituted 72% of all deaths, and fathers were more likely, compared with mothers, to die from external causes; 42% of paternal deaths and 26% of maternal deaths were caused by suicides, accidents and homicides
Summary
About 4% of all children in Sweden experience the death of a parent before their eighteenth birthday (Berg et al, 2016), and similar numbers are seen in other western countries (Parsons, 2011; Social Security Administration, 2000). Previous studies on long-term consequences of childhood parental death suggest that the experience of a parent’s death during childhood may have implications for health and well-being well in adulthood, e.g., with increased risks of depression and other affective disorders (Berg et al, 2016; Appel et al, 2013), suicidal behaviour (Rostila et al, 2016; Serafini et al, 2015), drug use disorder (Giordano et al, 2014) and premature mortality (Rostila and Saarela 2011; Li et al, 2014). Studies on potential longterm impact of childhood parental death are in general scarce and there are few studies on long-term consequences for anti-social behaviour and criminal offending among bereaved offspring. We aimed to investigate the possible association between parental death and violent criminal offending
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