I was putting together a set of slides for teaching tonight and inadvertently ran into some recent data. All these papers are open source, and I will be giving references.

The first, by Zhou and others, looks at “left behind children” — that is children who are placed in the care of relatives while their parents go elsewhere to find work. The image I have talks about the covariates for this: the groups are those children who have never been left behind, those who were left behind but are now reunited with their parents, and those who are currently not being looked after by their parents.

The second paper is from a large community survey of children and adolescents mental health. it uses the DIS, a fully structured interview, which probably over estimates the rate of disorder. In this analysis they compare the rates of disorder by family status: original (or intact) families, step parents, blended families and single parenthood.

It appears therefore that having a parent leave is bad for a child. Does this have an effect? Do these disorders matter — is what we are measuring reflect what is really there? I am not certain. But I do see a lot of adolescents referred because of distress, particularly self harm, in these fallen times.

And the final paper suggests that suicide is akin to an iceberg: perhaps it is better to say that the iceberg is self harm for girls and suicide for boys.