Adult Children’s Education and Parent Mortality: Exploring Mechanisms

Shawn Bauldry , Purdue University
Joseph Wolfe, University of Alabama at Birmingham

A series of recent studies find a robust association between adult children’s education and parent health. Three mechanisms are thought to underlie the observed associations: the provision of direct care, the transfer of financial resources, and the influence on health behaviors, in particular smoking, of parents. This research draws on data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Older Men and Mature Women and causal mediation models to test the three mechanisms.

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 Presented in Session 38. Intergenerational Processes in Population Health