Many children experience some type of temporary family stress situation throughout school age, such as parental disputes, the birth of a sibling or the illness of a relative. Despite the widespread nature of these type of temporary stressors, little is known about their potential lasting impact on children’s human capital development.
Especially in areas that are characterized by high path dependency, such as educational transitions, short-lived shocks may have long-lived consequences.
In this research, I investigate the consequences of one of the most common events of family distress - the death of a grandparent - on children’s short- and long-term academic outcomes. I use administrative data from the Netherlands and focus on the critical transition from primary education to tracked secondary education. More specifically, I compare educational outcomes between children who lose a grandparent shortly before the transition, to children who lose a grandparent shortly after the transition. This transition consists of a placement test and teacher recommendation that determine track placement in secondary school.
I find that children who experience the death of a grandparent shortly before the placement test, obtain roughly ten percent of a standard deviation lower test scores than children who lose a grandparent shortly after the test. The other determinant of track placement – the teacher’s track recommendation - further aggravates the negative impact of losing a grandparent, as these children receive on average lower track recommendations. Due to the poorer test scores and track recommendation, these children seem to have an increased chance to be placed in the vocational track at the start of secondary school compared to the general, academic or combined track. Four years after losing a grandparent the negative consequences of this initial disadvantage are still clearly visible, as in tenth grade treated children are 14.6 percent less likely to attend the academic track.
These results highlight that a comparatively mild event of family distress has the potential to induce a lasting negative impact on children’s development. Both objective and subjective ability assessments are influenced by temporary emotional distress after the death of a grandparent. Assuming that children’s academic potential remains unaltered, this implies that the assessments may be biased in the case of temporary setbacks. This is especially worrisome when the occurrence of family setbacks is not evenly distributed among the population, such as parental job loss, creating the potential for a further divide in the opportunities children receive.
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