In this ongoing work we investigate how the permanent departure of the father from the household, due to death or divorce, affects children's school enrolment and work participation in rural Colombia. In our empirical specification we use household-level fixed effects to deal with the fact that households that experience the departure of the father are likely to differ in unobserved ways from those that do not, and we also address the issue of non-random attrition from the panel. We also investigate the main channel behind the impacts we estimate, including income losses incurred and shifts in bargaining power.