Child Suicide: Age and Sex

Child Suicide: Age and Sex

Note: this is part of the Youth Suicide Rise project.

Child suicide is unsurprisingly more common the older a child is, but a lot more boys than girls kill themselves and suicide age patterns differ considerably between boys and girls.

Age

Nearly all (93%) child suicides between 1999 and 2017 were committed by teenagers:

The initial doubling of suicides with each additional year of age slows down during teenage years:

Here the blue is suicides in the age group a year younger, red is additional suicides, and the yellow line shows the ratio between suicides in consecutive age groups.

Sex

Boys kill themselves nearly three times as often as girls: there were 15,836 male suicides versus 5,658 female suicides under the age of 18 between 1999 and 2017 (a ratio of 2.8).

Similarly, the suicide rate for boys is about 2.7 as large as the rate for girls (there are about 5% more boys then girls, so the rates ratio is slightly lower).

Sex and Age

There is an important difference between boys and girls regarding their age of suicide: female child suicides peak at age 16, while male suicide at age 17 is far more likely than at age 16.

Indeed suicide rates remain similar for girls between ages 15 and 17 while they double for boys:

The differences in age patterns can be seen in the curve displaying the ratio of suicide rates between boys and girls:

Suicide among boys is therefore twice as likely during early teens, yet increases to being close to 4 times as likely by age 17.

Notes:

Apparently the 'natural' sex ratio is about 105:100, which fits CDC data very well.

CDC has data only on 'sex' (presumably as biologically determined at birth) rather than on 'gender' (as in psychologically determined by the mind of the child).

The sex and age patterns above apply only to recent USA data -- other nations may have significantly different patterns in their child suicide data.

The two youngest suicide victims in the CDC 1999-2017 data were ages 5 in 2003 (drowning) and 2008 (suffocation); it is unclear to me how it was possible to determine suicidal intent at age 5, especially when manner of death was drowning. There seems to be no relevant information online about either of these two cases.