FAMILY MATTERS: RELATIONSHIP DYNAMICS SURROUNDING THE DEATH OF A CHILD IN LATER LIFE

Despite the ubiquity of bereavement, few are prepared for the traumatic loss of a child.
Child death is regarded as the most painful experience of family bereavement because it disturbs
the natural order of life, leaving a lasting impression on bereaved parents and their families. Yet,
most prior research has focused its attention on individual adjustment to child death with
insufficient consideration of the impact of the loss on the family unit. Indeed, families are linked
in life and death, so the individual and relational processes surrounding child death should be
considered simultaneously. Drawing on data from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally
representative survey of American adults over the age of 50 and their spouses and children, this
dissertation attends to this supposition by exploring not only how the death of a child after age
50 impacts family functioning, but also how older parents’ individual adjustment to a child’s
death is shaped by their family relationships. The first analytic chapter investigates whether child
death in later life affects the risk of gray divorce, paying close attention to the buffering role of
marital quality prior to a child’s death and the role of parent-child genetic ties. The second
analytic chapter turns the focus to parent-child relationship dynamics by mapping trajectories of
older mothers’ and fathers’ relationships with their surviving children before, during, and after
the death of a child. The final analytic chapter examines parents’ dementia onset after losing a
child in later life and the protective role of family relationships. This dissertation attempts to
uncover the complex family processes surrounding the death of a child in later life, and in doing
so, aims to impel bereavement theory and research to treat child death as a family-wide trauma
with implications for individual family members, their relationships to one another, and the
family unit as a whole.