The impact of children on a parent's risk of suicide following death of a spouse, Belgium 1991–96

Abstract

Since Durkheim's work on suicide, the family has widely been seen as providing partial protection against the development of tendencies to suicide. This study assesses the impact of parenthood (both number of children and age of youngest child) on suicide following the death of a spouse. Using data for Belgium in the 5 years following the 1991 census, the study adopts a nested case–control design with information on 3,800 suicides and 75,673 matched controls. The analysis takes into account several social–economic variables. The findings show that the impact of children on the elevated suicide levels found among widows and widowers relative to the still married can be positive or negative, and differs by both age and sex of the parent, age of the child or children, and time since bereavement.

Keywords:

• mortality
• suicide
• spousal bereavement
• death of spouse
• parenthood
• Belgium

Notes

1. Patrick Lusyne, formerly at the Department of Sociology, Ghent University, is now at Statistics Belgium, Leuvenseweg 44, 1000 Brussels, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected]. Hilary Page is at the Department of Sociology, Ghent University.

2. The authors are grateful to Hade Snauwaert of Ghent University for her final reading of the paper and to Patrick Deboosere of the Interface Demography, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, for the linkage of census and death-registration data.