Older mother's health and adult children's education: Conceptualization of adult children's education and mother-child relationships

Abstract

This study joins and extends an emerging body of work examining the association between adult children's education and their parents' health by (1) providing a conceptual treatment of adult children's education, (2) examining the link between adult children's education and older mothers' physical and mental health, and (3) investigating whether mother-child relationships moderate the association between children's education and mothers' health. Data on 541 older mothers in the U.S. who reported on all of their adult children collected as part of the Within-Family Differences Study. Results indicate the best performing measure of adult children's education, the proportion with a college degree or higher, reflects a cumulative, credential-based approach. In addition, the proportion of adult children with a college degree or higher maintains a negative association with mother's depressive symptoms and activity limitations net of mother's own education as well as a number of sociodemographic factors and adult children's measures. There was no evidence that various aspects of mother-child relationships (geographic proximity, frequency of contact, and quality of relationships) moderated these negative associations.

Keywords: Adult children's education; Health inequalities; Measurement; Mother's health; Mother-child relationships; US.

Fig. 1

Conceptualization of adult children's education along two dimensions.

Fig. 2

Predicted values for depressive symptoms and predicted probabilities for activity limitations based on fully adjusted models (Model 3) across the range of proportion of adult children with a bachelor's degree or higher. Marginal distribution of proportion of children with a bachelor's degree or higher indicated in red on the x-axis. The shaded regions indicate 95% confidence intervals.