Learning from a Bitter Past? The Behavioral Effect of a Child's Death on Mothers

Using Demographic and Health Surveys from twenty-seven African countries, I examine the effect of the death of infants on their mothers’ health behaviors for the birth of their subsequent children. Controlling for the location and the year of a child's birth and utilising the timing of the child's death, I find that the experience of a child's death induces a mother's behavioral changes. Mothers, who experienced the death of their first child before the second child was born, were 3.0 percentage points more likely to deliver their second child with professional assistance and 3.9 percentage points more likely to deliver their second child at health facilities than mothers who did not experience the first child's death by the time of the second child's birth. On the other hand, the first child's death after the birth of the second child is not correlated with mother's health service utilisation for the birth of their second child. A set of robustness checks further confirm the effect of a child's death on the subsequent health behavior among mothers. This paper briefly suggests a potential policy based on the findings.