Impacts of Childhood Disability on Family

Abstract

Childhood disability significantly impacts family members. Limited by data, prior research has faced challenges in measurement and identification and focused primarily on maternal labor outcomes. Utilizing 20-year-long administrative records from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database, we study cerebral palsy (CP), one of the most prevalent causes of childhood disability. We leverage its unexpected nature and our comprehensive data to investigate a broad spectrum of impacts on family members. Adopting an event study approach, we examine various outcomes, including parental labor supply, mental health, marital status, and fertility. Our findings reveal that having a child with CP decreases the mother’s likelihood of employment by 6.2 percentage points (pp), increases the likelihood of divorce by 2.3 pp, and amplifies the risk of depression by 28%. Additionally, there’s a notable decrease in long-term fertility. These effects are more pronounced for parents in poorer socioeconomic conditions and for families with daughters who have CP. Keywords: Childhood Disability, Cerebral Palsy.

Keywords: J13, J14