Laboratory

Population Health

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

The Contribution of Adult Children to Parental Health and Survival (Dissertation)

Sanny Boy Domingo Afable, Mikko Myrskylä, Yana Catherine Vierboom, Julia Mikolai (University of St Andrews, United Kingdom), Hill Kulu (University of St Andrews, United Kingdom)

Detailed Description

Societies are aging, and this comes hand in hand with transformations in family composition and dynamics. Fertility is declining around the globe, thus challenging support structures for older persons, who may increasingly depend on their adult children for varying forms and levels of care. At the same time, increasing mobility, the destandardization of the life course, and the resurgence of multigenerational households are among the many factors that shape the relationship between adult children and their parents today.

The presence of adult children is often presumed to be beneficial to older people, but this is not always the case. For instance, an abundance of studies has found robust evidence that the education of adult children reduces their parents’ risk of mortality, which may be explained by an increased capacity for support among those who are higher educated. At the same time, not all forms of support have a positive effect on older people, especially when they come at the expense of their independence and social expectations.

Research in this area has produced important results, but it has several methodological limitations, including the failure to account for endogeneity bias. Adult children can impact their parents’ health, but the latter can also affect the former in a variety of ways, including residential decisions, frequency of contact, and inherited or shared characteristics.

As a contribution to this growing research, this project explores the many threads that bind adult children and their parents. The concept of linked lives is a unifying idea for this undertaking. It recognizes that the life-course trajectories of adult children and their parents are interwoven: The former’s parenthood can mean the latter’s grandparenthood; an adult’s decision to migrate can result in leaving aging parents behind; the death of a child before the parents die is a major stressor that may compound the parents’ risk of dying.

High-quality longitudinal data from high-income countries allow us to see these threads. Setting the context of this project, we first examine the correlation between the critical life events of adult children and their parents’ health trajectories in late life. Among these critical events is family formation, and so we next analyze the association of grandparenthood with selected morbidity risks. We then investigate the residential proximity and co-residential status of adult children. The goal is to clarify their longitudinal associations with their parents’ health outcomes, using advanced approaches to control for endogeneity. Finally, we investigate the short-term and long-term impacts of experiencing the premature death of an adult child on the older persons’ health and survival, a discussion that is especially relevant amid increasing longevity.