Parental job loss and children’s well-being: The role of unemployment duration, reemployment, and socioeconomic status

We examine the effect of parental job loss on children’s well-being at ages 6 to 9 and address whether the effect depends on subsequent unemployment duration, reemployment, and the socioeconomic status of the parent. The analysis is based on a mandatory school well-being survey, which is answered by the children and conducted annually in Danish public schools (2014-2019) linked to administrative register data (193,124 children). A child-level fixed effect model is used to adjust for time-constant confounders. Our results suggest that parental job loss in itself has a limited impact on children’s well-being. Yet, the results suggest that children of fathers who did not find reemployment, and experienced prolonged unemployed had a reduction in well-being. Moreover, the results indicated that children of mothers with higher socioeconomic status were negatively affected by maternal job loss, while children of lower-status fathers were more negatively affected by paternal job loss.