Cohort Trends in Child Loss: Evidence from Sweden

Sarah Zureick, University of Wisconsin at Madison

We investigate historical, current, and projected trends in child loss in Sweden with an aim of understanding how the risk of losing a child changes over the course of the demographic transition. We use a long series of historical and projected age-specific fertility and mortality rates along with demographic formulas and microsimulation to quantify the expected number of children lost and surviving by mother's age, the average number of children lost by mother's birth cohort, and the proportion of the cohort of mothers that can expect to experience a child loss. We find considerable variation in expected child loss and in the expected number of surviving children by mother's age across birth cohorts of mothers. While it has become increasingly rare that a mother will experience child loss, mothers in more recent cohorts who do lose children experience these losses when they themselves are elderly.