Emily Smith-Greenaway, University of Southern California

About the Presentation

Vast social science literature demonstrate that children growing up in racially and socioeconomically marginalized families in the U.S. are more likely to experience a host of adversities and stressors in their early lives—from parental incarceration, chronic poverty, and housing instability to higher rates of police contact, intrapersonal violence, and parental separation. Yet, children’s exposure to one source of family adversity in the U.S. has been curiously overlooked: premature parental death. Although demographers often assume that exposure to parental death is too rare of a phenomenon to study in national samples of children in the U.S., recent research demonstrates that converging crises, including COVID-19, the opioid epidemic, gun violence, and ‘deaths of despair’ have given way to a rise in mid-life mortality, corresponding to concomitant rise in children’s exposure to parental death. In this talk, I will present results from the Future of the Families and Child Wellbeing data to offer a portrait of the burden of parental death as experienced by this cohort, and the consequences that it portends for multiple dimensions of their wellbeing and development. The results demonstrate the growing need to acknowledge parental death as a common and consequential childhood adversity in the United States.

About the Speaker

Emily Smith-Greenaway is Dean’s Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California, where she is also a Dean’s Leadership Fellow in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. Her research infuses social-psychological perspectives into demography in an effort to advance how we quantify and theorize key population processes and how we study them in cause and consequence. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Seminar Format

Location IN PERSON: 2208 LeFrak Hall. We are requesting advanced registration so that we can track capacity. Please use this link to RSVP.

Location ONLINE VIA ZOOM: Zoom Registration Link. Registration link will be provided approximately 2 weeks in advance of the seminar. Upon registration, you will receive an automatically generated email with the direct link for the seminar

If accommodations are needed, please send request to meeting organizer (mprc-support@umd.edu) at least 72 hours prior to the event, if possible, to allow time to discuss and implement alternatives.

COVID-19 Information

MPRC public events for Spring 2025 will be a mix of in person and online via Zoom.  For in person events, all event attendees must follow current protocols.