The intergenerational transmission from adult Children's education to parents' health in China: Nonlinearity and mechanisms

Abstract

Current studies suggest the intergenerational transmission of educational advantages is bidirectional over the life course. However, results from causal analysis studies do not consistently support the beneficial effect of adult children's education on aging parents' health. The conflicting evidence indicates a complex relationship, which may be nonlinear or only prominent in certain settings or explained by specific pathways, but remains unexplored. Using the 2016 and 2018 China Family Panel Studies data and instrumental variable estimation, we examine the effect of adult children's education on parents' health and systematically explore its heterogeneity and underlying mechanisms. Our study finds that adult children's education significantly improves parents' health in middle and older ages using instrumental variables estimation with two-stage least squares (IV/2SLS), but the effect may be nonlinear. The beneficial intergenerational transfer of health may slightly weaken when adult children's educational attainment exceeds the middle school education level. The effect of adult children's education on parents' health may be more notable in less developed regions and among younger parents and parents living with or less educated than their adult children. The mechanism analyses results suggest that adult children's education may enhance parents' health through both stress-based pathways (i.e., family economic hardship) and resource-based pathways (i.e., emotional support from children, housework support from parents, and improving parents' access to the resources), but not via the analyzed health habits. Our findings suggest that promoting children's education may improve parents' health over the life course, especially at least graduating from middle school. Our findings imply that prioritizing basic education policy in less developed regions, and providing buffers for economic stressors or enhancing daily intergenerational interactions within families are important for healthy aging in developing societies.