The Effect of Fathers’ Combat Exposure on the Family

Abstract

Soldiers deployed to unstable areas suffer increased risk of developing mental disorders, and children of the deployed also face increased risk of behavioral problems. While many studies have documented associations between parental deployment and child mental health, none have identified the causal effect of individual’s exposure to combat while deployed. For Denmark, which deployed 9,000 soldiers for peace-enforcing missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have research access to confidential mission reports detailing individual soldier combat exposure. Linking these soldiers with their teenage children (at the end of compulsory schooling) and exploiting that combat exposure among the deployed is as good as random, we estimate the effect of fathers’ combat exposure on their children’s test scores. To disentangle the effect of father’s absences from other mechanisms, we explore the impact of combat exposure on the soldier’s mental health and how father’s combat exposure may affect other family members. The results – robust to several falsification tests – show that children of exposed fathers have lower test scores than children of deployed fathers not exposed to combat (an effect size of 0.13 standard deviation). Moreover, we find that combat exposure affects not only the father’s mental health (substance abuse diagnosis), but also that of the mother and children (higher use of mental health services and antidepressants).