Research Group

Kinship Inequalities

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

The Years We Share: Mother-Child Shared Lifetime, Health, and Intergenerational Transfers

Amanda Martins de Almeida, Diego Alburez-Gutierrez

Detailed Description

Description:

Family networks provide essential support, resources, and socialization throughout the life course. The "linked lives" perspective emphasizes that the advantages or disadvantages experienced by one family member affect others. This perspective also stresses the mutual nature of these ties: mothers impact their children, and conversely, children affect maternal outcomes. However, most research has focused on maternal effects on children, leaving the reverse pathway and the temporal dimension of intergenerational exchange largely unexplored.

This dissertation fills this gap by examining the demographic constraints for mothers and children to support each other, as well as the direction of support from children to mothers. Longer periods of shared lifetime imply greater opportunities for mutual support. Furthermore, the mother's health during those shared years is important. When she is healthy, the relationship can involve reciprocal caregiving. When she is unhealthy, the child's ability to provide care becomes a critical source of support. By highlighting the duration of the mother–child overlap and the mother's health during that period, this study paves the way for a more comprehensive analysis of the mother–child relationship's potential in providing care and resources.

The first paper investigates the impact of children's education on maternal survival in Chile. We use the orphanhood method to estimate maternal mortality based on reports of parental survival from children. We find that higher educational achievement among adult children is associated with better maternal survival, particularly among mothers with a low level of education. This suggests that educated children may provide health knowledge, financial support, or care that improves their mothers' chances of living longer.

The second paper introduces two new demographic indicators: Shared Lifetime (SLT), the average number of years a mother and child are alive at the same time, and Years of Shared Life Lost (YSLL), the years lost due to death. We estimate these measures for every country using formal models, age-specific fertility rates, and life tables from the United Nations World Population Prospects (1950–2023). The results demonstrate a universal increase in SLT over time; however, substantial cross-national disparities persist. These patterns highlight the impact of variations in fertility and mortality dynamics on the amount of time that mothers and children can spend together and have significant implications for intergenerational support.

The third paper builds on the Shared Lifetime concept by introducing the Healthy Shared Lifetime (HSLT), which estimates the number of years that a mother and child share while the mother is in good health. Using Danish registry data linking kinship records with national health information, we calculate the HSLT for mother-child dyads. This method distinguishes years spent in good health from years spent in health versus illness, offering a more nuanced understanding of the quality of time spent within the family unit.

This dissertation advances the study of intergenerational family transfer dynamics, offering researchers and policymakers a concise framework to evaluate the potential of mutual mother-child support. This framework has significant implications for mitigating health disparities and promoting well-being across generations.