Abstract
Demographic research has paid much attention to the impact of childhood conditions on adult mortality. We focus on one of the key aspects of early life conditions, sibling group size, and examine the causal effect of growing up in a large family on mortality. While previous studies have focused on low- or middle-income countries, we examine whether growing up in a large family is a disadvantage in Sweden, a context where most parents have adequate resources, which are complemented by a generous welfare state. We used Swedish register data and frailty models, examining all-cause and cause-specific mortality between the ages of 40 and 74 for the 1938–72 cohorts, and also a quasi-experimental approach that exploited multiple births as a source of exogenous variation in the number of siblings. Overall our results do not indicate that growing up in a large family has a detrimental effect on longevity in Sweden.
Highlights
Recent years have seen researchers across the social sciences directing their attention towards the longterm consequences of early life conditions, especially in terms of the quality and duration of life (Galobardes et al 2004; Bengtsson and Mineau 2009; Myrskylä 2010)
Our study focused on mortality before age 74
A growing body of literature has demonstrated the importance of early life conditions for later-life outcomes, including mortality, the findings presented in this study are consistent with the overall pattern that the trade-off between the quantity of siblings and their education is strong in countries with a liberal economic system, but very weak or non-existent in countries with welfare state arrangements that support families with children (Park 2008; Xu 2008)
Summary
Recent years have seen researchers across the social sciences directing their attention towards the longterm consequences of early life conditions, especially in terms of the quality and duration of life (Galobardes et al 2004; Bengtsson and Mineau 2009; Myrskylä 2010). There is a growing body of literature examining the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES), family structure, and health in early childhood in relation to adult mortality (Bengtsson and Lindström 2000; Gluckman et al 2008; Bengtsson and Broström 2009; Gagnon and Mazan 2009; Huang and Elo 2009; Van den Berg et al 2009; Barclay and Kolk 2015). There have been very few studies examining the relationship between number of siblings and longevity (Hart and Smith 2003; Smith et al 2009; Donrovich et al 2014). The study reported in this paper aimed to examine whether the necessity of dividing parental resources among a large number of children has a long-lasting effect on the duration of those individuals’. We used a quasi-experimental design to estimate the isolated effect on mortality of an additional sibling, through an exogenous increase in the size of the sibling group due to a twin birth
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