Parental separation risk before and after the diagnosis of a child physical health condition

Results of previous research examining whether children’s physical health conditions increase the risk of parental separation show considerable heterogeneity, potentially due to varying degrees of severity of health conditions, or to reverse causality or diagnostic delays for certain conditions. This study aims to extend the previous literature by categorizing eight common child health conditions into grades of severity, and estimating changes in parental separation risk before and after the first diagnosis. Using total population data from Finnish registers, we follow 363,830 couples whose first child was born between 1987 and 2000 until the child’s 18th birthday. We identify parents whose child was diagnosed with a less severe (allergies, atopic dermatitis, chronic/repeated ear infections), severe (type 1 diabetes, epilepsy, inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis), or life-threatening (cancer) physical health condition, and use discrete-time event-history-models to examine changes in parental separation risk in each group compared to those in couples whose first child remained undiagnosed. Our results reveal that changes in separation risk differed by the severity of the child's health condition, with the risk temporarily declining following the diagnosis of a life-threatening condition, but increasing following the diagnosis of a severe condition. In contrast, separation risk was already elevated years before the first diagnosis of a less severe condition, and began to decline after the diagnosis. These findings suggest that while most parents avoided separation at the time of the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness, the stress and burden related to children’s physical health conditions otherwise increased parental separation risk.