Wrongful death damages for minor children fall into two categories that require different evidence and different expert witnesses. The economic damages, covering the loss of financial support and the value of household services the decedent would have provided, are amenable to expert calculation and can be presented with numerical precision. The non-economic damages, covering the loss of parental guidance, training, companionship, and moral support, require a different kind of evidence: testimony about the relationship, the decedent's actual involvement in the child's life, and the specific mentorship and guidance the child has lost. Both categories are recoverable under California's wrongful death statute, and both require careful development in discovery and at trial.
Loss of Financial Support: The Economic Calculation
The loss of financial support is calculated by projecting what the decedent would have earned and contributed to the family's support over the remainder of the decedent's working life and, if the decedent would have provided support into the child's adult years, into the period of post-majority dependency. The calculation requires an economic expert who can address the decedent's historical earnings, the reasonable projection of future earnings based on education, career trajectory, and industry, and the portion of those earnings that would have been contributed as family support.
The economic report should also address present value discounting, since an award for future economic losses must be reduced to present value to avoid overpayment. Inflation adjustments, the federal tax treatment of projected earnings, and the mortality risk adjustment for the decedent's remaining life expectancy are all components of a defensible economic analysis. The economic expert's methodology should match the jurisdiction's standard approach: California courts use a net present value calculation based on historical real wage growth rates, and the expert's report should be structured to withstand cross-examination on the specific assumptions.
Value of Household Services
Household services provided by the decedent represent an economic loss that is separate from financial support. These services include childcare, home maintenance, cooking, cleaning, tutoring, transportation, and any other domestic services the decedent regularly provided. Courts have consistently held that household services are compensable even when the decedent was not employed in the formal labor market, because the economic value of those services is ascertainable by reference to market rates for comparable services.
Documenting household services requires both fact witnesses and a household services expert or forensic economist. Fact witnesses, typically the surviving spouse, family members, and neighbors, establish what services the decedent actually provided: the daily schedule, the specific tasks, and the frequency and duration of each. The expert translates those facts into market value using published wage data for domestic workers, childcare providers, tutors, and other service categories. In cases involving decedents who were primary caregivers for young children, the household services component can exceed the financial support component, particularly when the decedent was not in the paid workforce.
Parental Guidance, Training, and Companionship
The non-economic component of a minor child's wrongful death claim is the loss of the parental relationship: the guidance, training, mentorship, discipline, moral education, and companionship that the parent would have provided. Unlike financial support, this component cannot be reduced to a calculation. It must be proved through evidence that makes the specific parent-child relationship concrete for the jury: how much time the parent spent with the child, what activities they did together, what the parent was teaching the child, and what kind of relationship they had.
Evidence for this component comes from multiple sources. Photographs and home videos showing the family's activities together are powerful. School records showing the parent's involvement in the child's education, teachers who can testify about the parent's presence at school events, coaches who observed the parent-child relationship, and family friends who were present during family activities all contribute to a picture of a specific and active parental relationship. The surviving child's own testimony, where age permits, and the testimony of the surviving spouse about the parent's role in the family are also central evidence.
Plaintiff's counsel should also work with the family to identify whether the decedent had any specific mentoring role based on professional expertise or personal experience: a parent who was an educator, a skilled tradesperson, a musician, or an athlete brings to the parental relationship a specific type of guidance the child has lost that can be articulated in terms concrete enough for a jury to understand and value.
California-Specific Considerations
California does not cap wrongful death non-economic damages in ordinary negligence cases. In medical malpractice wrongful death cases, however, the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act imposes a cap on non-economic damages that applies to each decedent, not to each plaintiff. As amended by AB 35, the non-economic cap in medical malpractice wrongful death cases is $500,000 as of 2023 and will scale upward annually through 2033. This cap limits the total non-economic recovery across all beneficiaries, including minor children, which affects how the damages case is structured and presented in med-mal wrongful death cases differently than in motor vehicle or product liability cases where no comparable cap applies. For the broader wrongful death damages framework and survival action strategy, the wrongful-death category covers the full range of death case damages issues. Economic damages methodology in wrongful death cases often involves the same forensic economics testimony used in severe injury cases, which is discussed further in the case-law-settlements category in the context of verdict and settlement data. For lien and disbursement considerations when wrongful death proceeds are distributed to minor beneficiaries through court approval, including trust structures for minor settlements, the liens-and-settlement category covers the applicable procedures.