Parental Death, Family Cohesion, and Life Course Mental Health

• In Event: 30664 - Social Ties and Networks Across the Life Course

Abstract

Parental and family ties are key social resources across the life course, especially in the early life course stages of childhood and adolescence, when youth are developing in ways that shape life course pathways. Losing a key social tie in early life via parental death is a substantially disruptive stressor that can affect life course mental health, through set-points of persistently worse mental health, cascading/mounting effects with age, or waning effects with age. However, family social ties can provide important resources after parental loss. In the stress process framework, the mental health effects of the initial stressor of parental death may be buffered by the social resource of greater family cohesion. Additionally, such patterns may differ with the gender of the deceased parent, as parental gender shapes roles and relationships, especially early in the life course. Using survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N=18,280, Waves I-V), we examine the impact of maternal and paternal death prior to Wave 1 on life course trajectories of mental health from ages 12-42 and the role of family cohesion in adolescence within this process. Preliminary results indicate evidence of family cohesion buffering effects of maternal death on initial depressive levels in adolescence. Results speak to the importance of mothers as primary attachment figures in childhood in tandem with cohesive family ties that can help to mitigate the lasting life course impact of maternal loss. This study advances our understanding of childhood parental death as a major stressor shaping depressive trajectories from adolescence to adulthood, the buffering role of cohesive family ties, and the importance of parent’s gender in understanding risks for life course mental health.

Authors

• Christina Kamis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Molly Copeland, University of Notre Dame

• Allison Stolte, University of Virginia