The single parent family and the child's mental health

Irma Moilanen and Paula Rantakallio

Social Science & Medicine, 1988, vol. 27, issue 2, 181-186

Abstract: The prevalence of psychiatric and psychosomatic disorders in a 1 year birth cohort from northern Finland followed up until 19 years was examined on the basis of hospital records and national registers for subsidies for chronically sick children. Psychiatric disorders were found to occur with higher frequency in children of single parent families, especially those lacking a father during the child's whole life. Childhood enuresis was most frequent in the children who had experienced the divorce of their parents. Discriminant function analysis was used to establish the explanatory value of the family constellation for both psychiatric disorders and enuresis. The other significant explanatory variables for psychiatric disorders were school performance, place of residence and the child's height at 1 year of age, with poor school performance, high population density and short stature increasing the risk. The other significant variables increasing the risk of enuresis were psychiatric disorders, poor school performance, juvenile smoking and small size of dwelling. Disabled children had psychiatric disorders 9 times as frequently as non-disabled ones.

Keywords: single; parent; child; psychiatric; disorders; enuresis; disability; school; performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1988
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(88)90327-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:27:y:1988:i:2:p:181-186

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().