Unknown, however, is whether adult offspring’s schooling is related to parental mortality in the United States. Important exceptions include Zimmer and colleagues ( 2002, 2007), who have shown that offspring’s schooling is associated with older parents’ mortality and the severity of parents’ functional limitations in Taiwan, and also Torssander ( 2013), who has shown a similar relationship for parental mortality in Sweden. Much less attention, however, has been devoted to the relationship between adult offspring’s schooling and their parents’ health and mortality.
2002) and that the socioeconomic resources of one member of a married couple are related to the survival of the other (Mare and Palloni 1988 Smith and Zick 1994). We do know that parents’ socioeconomic characteristics are associated with their offspring’s mortality (Kuh et al. Few studies, however, have considered family-level measures of SES and its relationship to mortality. Background Educational Attainment as a Family-Level ResourceĪn extensive body of research exists on the relationship between individual-level SES and health in a variety of contexts (for a review, see Elo 2009). This article contributes to our understanding of the potentially bidirectional flow of gains in the intergenerational transmission of education as well as how those benefits manifest in parents’ longevity.
Similar mechanisms to those linking one’s own schooling to improved longevity-such as greater access to health information, more income, more flexible jobs, and a healthier lifestyle-may be provided to parents by their well-educated offspring. Improvements in the schooling of one generation may have consequences for others in the broader family network: in this case, older parents. We provide evidence here that this is not necessarily the case. This work also addresses longstanding concerns about “generational equity” (e.g., Preston 1984), which suggest that research and policies focused on older members of a population must do so at the expense of the young, and vice versa. This article investigates whether the educational attainments of individuals should be viewed as a family resource, benefiting not only the individuals themselves but also their parents. Despite an extensive body of work on the relationship between SES and health, however, few studies have considered the SES of the family-that is, beyond that of the married couple,-and its relationship with health and mortality. Higher levels of schooling, in particular, are associated with better health, even more so than income. The association between one’s own socioeconomic status (SES) and health and longevity is well documented (Liang et al.
#The offspring members full#
To harness the full value of schooling for health, then, a family and multigenerational perspective is needed.Įducation, Mortality, Intergenerational, Survival analysis Introduction These findings suggest that one way to influence the health of the elderly is through their offspring. Furthermore, at least part of the association between offspring’s schooling and parents’ survival may be explained by parents’ health behaviors, including smoking and physical activity. This relationship is more pronounced for deaths that are linked to behavioral factors: most notably, chronic lower respiratory disease and lung cancer. We show that adult offspring’s educational attainments have independent effects on their parents’ mortality, even after controlling for parents’ own socioeconomic resources. We use data from the 1992–2006 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine whether adult offspring’s educational attainments are associated with parents’ survival in the United States. For instance, well-educated offspring have greater knowledge of health and technology to share with their parents and more financial means to provide for them than do their less-educated counterparts.
However, parents’ investment in their offspring’s schooling may yield significant returns for parents themselves in later life. Contemporary stratification research on developed societies usually views the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage as a one-way effect from parent to child.
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