Offspring Educational Attainment and Older Parents' Cognition in Mexico.

Population-level disparities in later-life cognitive health point to the importance of family resources. Although the bulk of prior work establishes the directional flow of resources from parents to offspring, the "linked lives" perspective raises the question of how offspring resources could affect parental health as well. This paper examines whether adult children's education influences older parents' (aged 50+) cognitive health in Mexico, where schooling reforms have contributed to significant gains in the educational achievements of recent birth cohorts. Harnessing a change in compulsory school laws and applying an instrumental variables approach, we found that each year of offspring schooling was associated with higher overall cognition among parents, but was less predictive across different cognitive functioning domains. More offspring schooling improved parents' cognitive abilities in verbal learning, verbal fluency, and orientation, but not in visual scanning, visuo-spatial ability, or visual memory. The beneficial effects of offspring schooling on those cognitive domains are more salient for mothers compared to fathers, suggesting potential gendered effects in the influence of offspring schooling. The results remained robust to controls for parent-child contact and geographic proximity, suggesting other avenues through which offspring education could affect parental health and a pathway for future research. Our findings contribute to growing research which stresses the causal influence of familial educational attainment on population health.

Intermarriage and mother-child relationships.

Research indicates that when adult children marry, ties to parents weaken. Yet less is known about how spousal characteristics, and specifically, spouse's race or ethnicity, affect ties to the family of origin. This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to ask how interracial/ethnic marriage, compared to same-race/ethnicity marriage, is associated with ties to mothers among young adults in the United States. Results indicate that offspring who are intermarried differ little in their relationships to mothers compared to those who married same-race/ethnicity partners. However, findings from this study suggest that intermarriage may have greater consequences for some groups, such as Blacks, compared to other racial/ethnic groups. Overall, the results highlight how intermarriage has a relatively limited effect on offspring relationships with mothers and suggest a role for future research that examines how ties to parents during adolescence may shape partner choices during young adulthood.

Family Obligation Across Contexts: Hispanic Youth in North Carolina and Southern California.

Over the past decade, the Hispanic population has grown in areas with little to no history of recent immigration. Prior research comparing Hispanics in new and established destinations has chiefly focused on differences in socioeconomic indicators of assimilation. Our paper departs from this work by shifting the focus to sociocultural outcomes. Specifically, we use data from Los Angeles and North Carolina to examine differences in the strength of family obligation (N=552). We find that demographic characteristics explain all of the geographic difference in family obligation between these locations. However, we also find that co-ethnic concentration is positively correlated with adolescents' endorsement of future family support, once ethnic identity is included in the analysis.

CHILDREN'S UNION STATUS AND CONTACT WITH MOTHERS: A CROSS-NATIONAL STUDY.

BACKGROUND: In North America and Europe, population aging challenges the institutions responsible for elder care. In these environments, older individuals rely on offspring to provide social, instrumental and financial support. However, reliance on offspring, and offspring's provision of support, depend on several factors. OBJECTIVE: In this paper, we examine how offspring's union status is associated with maternal contact and distinguish between offspring who are married, cohabiting or single. METHODS: We use data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Survey and the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe to compare the association between adult children's union status and contact with mothers. Our sample consists of 9,779 mothers and 20,795 of their adult children across 15 countries. We employ multi-level analyses to account for variation in contact across and within family units and country contexts. RESULTS: We find that across all countries, cohabiting offspring have the least contact with mothers compared to married or single offspring. However, the effects of marriage are not universal and vary greatly across countries. In some countries, marriage is associated with less contact with mothers; in others, marriage binds generations together and intergenerational contact is greater than when offspring are single. Differences between married and cohabiting offspring also vary across contexts. We interpret these findings in light of cross-national variation in norms of parental obligations, public support for the elderly and kin relationships in weak versus strong family systems.

Consequences of deferred action for childhood arrivals for parent health: Applying a social foreground perspective.

Objective: This study applies a social foreground perspective to assess whether the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program impacted the self-rated health of coresident parents of DACA-eligible individuals. Background: DACA status grants a temporary work permit and allows for a stay of deportation for undocumented persons who entered the United States as children. Although research points to the positive health benefits of DACA for its recipients, less is known about whether the program affects the health of family members, including parents. Method: This study uses data from the National Health Interview Study (2008-2015) on foreign-born adults and their coresident parents. We applied a difference-in-differences design to examine whether the self-rated health of coresident mothers and fathers changed following the passage of DACA for DACA-eligible individuals. Results: In contrast to expectations, DACA was associated with worse self-rated health among coresident, partnered parents. These results may be because DACA also decreased the likelihood of coresiding with parents and changed the composition of coresident parents themselves. Following DACA, fewer eligible offspring lived with parents overall, but among those that did, parents tended to be older and less healthy. Conclusion: Findings underscore how DACA may be used as a resource to support older parents experiencing health challenges, in particular among older undocumented immigrants, who make up a growing share of the undocumented population in the United States.

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Mental Health and Mental Health Care During The COVID-19 Pandemic.

During the pandemic, the overall mental health of the US population declined. Given higher rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths experienced by communities of color along with greater exposure to pandemic-related stressors (e.g., unemployment, food insecurity), we expect that the decline in mental health during the pandemic was more pronounced among Black, Hispanic, and Asian adults, with these groups also having less access to mental health services. We examine two nationally representative US surveys: the 2019 National Household Interview Survey (NHIS; N = 30,368) and the 2020-2021 Household Pulse Survey (HPS; N = 1,677,238). We find mental health of Black, Hispanic, and Asian respondents worsened relative to White respondents during the pandemic, with significant increases in depression and anxiety among racialized minorities compared to Whites. There is also evidence of especially high mental health burden for Black adults around the murder of George Floyd by police and for Asian adults around the murder of six Asian women in Atlanta. White respondents are most likely to receive professional mental health care before and during the pandemic, and Black, Hispanic, and Asian respondents demonstrate higher levels of unmet mental health care needs during the pandemic than White respondents. Our results indicate that within the current environment, White adults are at a large and systemic advantage buffering them from unexpected crises-like the COVID-19 pandemic. Without targeted interventions, the long-term social consequences of the pandemic and other co-occurring events (e.g., death of Black and Hispanic people by police) will likely include widening mental health disparities between racial/ethnic groups.

Black-White Differences in Offspring Educational Attainment and Older Parents' Dementia.

Emerging research documents the health benefits of having highly educated adult offspring. Yet less is known about whether those advantages vary across racial groups. This study examines how offspring education is tied to parents' dementia risk for Black and White parents in the United States. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, findings suggest that children's education does not account for the Black-White gap in dementia risk. However, results confirm that parental race moderates the relationship between children's education and dementia risk and that the association between children's education and parents' dementia risk is strongest among less-educated parents. Among less-educated parents, higher levels of children's attainment prevent the risk of dementia onset for Black parents, but low levels of offspring schooling increase dementia risk among White parents. The study highlights how offspring education shapes the cognitive health of social groups differently and points to new avenues for future research.

Interracial unions and sleep duration among heterosexual American adults.

For Americans in romantic unions, sleep occurs in the context of couple relationships. Romantic partners influence one another's circadian rhythms, share beds, buffer or cause stress, and share resources that can be used to improve sleep. Moreover, sleep among individuals in interracial relationships may be negatively impacted by the social construction of race/ethnicity that drive health disparities and that point to the importance of factors such as racism, stress and social adversity that represent the unique lived reality of interracial couples in the U.S. Using non-dyadic data from the 2004-2018 National Health Interview Survey (n = 243,552) we fit a series of multinomial regression models predicting self-reported sleep duration of six or fewer (short), seven to eight (normal), and nine or more (long) hours. After adjusting for demographics, household socioeconomic characteristics, and health characteristics/behaviors, we find that individuals in interracial unions report significantly higher odds of short sleep compared to normal sleep. Race/ethnic stratified models indicated that all respondents in interracial relationships had higher odds of reporting short sleep, but that the association was particularly pronounced among non-Hispanic White adults and Hispanic adults. Generally, we find few differences in these associations between men and women or between those in marital versus those in cohabiting relationships. Future research should continue to investigate how social inequality conditions sleep for Americans in romantic relationships.

Black-White Differences in the Link Between Offspring College Attainment and Parents' Depressive Symptom Trajectories.

This study examines whether the relationship between children's college attainment and their parents' mental health differs for Black and White parents as they age. Data come from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and multilevel growth curve models are used to assess parents' depressive symptom trajectories. Results indicated that parents over age 50 whose children all completed college had significantly lower initial levels of depressive symptoms than those with no college-educated children. The initial benefit was stronger for Blacks than Whites. Results stratified further by parents' education show that Black parents at nearly all levels of schooling experienced stronger returns to their mental health from children's college completion compared to White parents, for whom only those with a high school education showed an inverse association between offspring education and depression symptoms. The findings underscore how offspring education is a potential resource for reducing disparities in health across families.

Adult child socio-economic status disadvantage and cognitive decline among older parents in Mexico.

There is growing interest in the contribution of offspring educational attainment to parents' health outcomes. However, less is known about the impacts of offspring socio-economic status (SES) on parents' cognitive decline or about the role of offspring SES disadvantage. We used data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study (n = 10,426) to evaluate the impact of adult child SES disadvantage on parents' verbal memory trajectories over fourteen years (2001-2015). We estimated linear mixed models and used measures of adult child SES (educational, financial, and employment) disadvantage. Our most robust finding was that having an adult child with less than secondary education was associated with faster decline in verbal memory z-scores for older women (ß: -0.009 [95% CI: -0.01, -0.001]) and men (ß: -0.01 [95% CI: -0.02, -0.01]). Although poor adult child financial well-being was associated with a faster decline in parents' verbal memory z-scores, this finding was less consistent across model specifications. Additional analyses also suggested some evidence of heterogeneity by parents' own educational attainment and gender. These findings highlight the potential importance of children's socio-economic status for the cognitive aging of their older parents.

How Families Matter for Health Inequality during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

We theorize that social conditions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to increase the importance of families for health and widen existing inequalities. We suggest three primary tenets important for understanding families and health during COVID-19. First, risks of specific COVID-19 outcomes and other health problems are unevenly distributed across families. Second, how families impact health during the COVID-19 pandemic is conditional on public policies, organizational decisions, and concurrent events. Third, many health inequalities driven by racism, sexism, classism, and other oppressive societal force are amplified during COVID-19, but the extent to which this is occurring is shaped by families and by the public policies, organizational decisions, and concurrent events that also impact families and health. As health disparities continue to emerge from this pandemic, we call on researchers and policy-makers to pay attention to the multiple ways that families matter.

The Education of Multiple Family Members and the Life-Course Pathways to Cognitive Impairment.

OBJECTIVES: This article asks how the educational attainments of multiple family members, including parents and offspring, are associated with the cognitive health of older adults in the United States. METHODS: We use panel data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (2000-2012) to examine how the education of an individual, their parent(s), and their offspring are associated with the prevalence of moderate/severe cognitive impairment and the onset of cognitive impairment among older adults using logistic regression and discrete-time event history analysis, respectively. RESULTS: We found that when combined, only the education of the individual is inversely associated with cognitive impairment at baseline. However, both the educational attainments of an individual and their offspring are negatively associated with the risk of becoming cognitively impaired, among individuals who were not already cognitively impaired. Conversely, parental education was not predictive of being cognitively impaired or the onset of impairment. Furthermore, we found that respondent gender did not moderate the relationship between a family member's education and respondent cognitive health. DISCUSSION: This study adds to current research by asking how resources from earlier and subsequent generations matter for older adults' cognitive health. Although we found little evidence that parental education matters at this life stage, results suggest that offspring education has a salient positive effect on later-life cognitive health. This finding underscores an overlooked source of health disparities-offspring resources-and highlights how a family perspective remains a powerful tool for understanding health inequalities in later life.

Depression in Later Life: The Role of Adult Children's College Education for Older Parents' Mental Health in the United States.

OBJECTIVES: Research on the socioeconomic gradient in mental health links disadvantaged family background with subsequent symptoms of depression, demonstrating the "downstream" effect of parental resources on children's mental health. This study takes a different approach by evaluating the "upstream" influence of adult children's educational attainment on parents' depressive symptoms. METHODS: Using longitudinal data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (N = 106,517 person-years), we examine whether children's college attainment influences their parents' mental health in later life and whether this association increases with parental age. We also assess whether the link between children's college completion and parents' depression differs by parents' own education. RESULTS: Parents with children who completed college have significantly lower levels of depressive symptoms than parents without college-educated children, although the gap between parents narrows with age. In addition, at baseline, parents with less than a high school education were more positively affected by their children's college completion than parents who themselves had a college education, a finding which lends support to theories of resource substitution. DISCUSSION: Offspring education is an overlooked resource that can contribute to mental health disparities among older adults in a country with unequal access to college educations.

Parent-child relationships and interracial first union formation in the United States.

The family of origin was once considered an important "third party" in shaping offspring romantic relationships. However, the increased independence of young adults challenges this idea by suggesting that parents today may have less control over children's romantic lives than prior generations. Drawing on a "linked lives" framework, this paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and discrete-time competing risks event history analysis to examine whether an individual's relationship with parents during adolescence affects entry into first unions with same- or different-race partners in young adulthood. Findings suggest that stronger parent-child ties in adolescence deterred entry into any union in young adulthood- same-race or interracial, relative to forming no unions. However, stronger intergenerational ties were associated with an increased likelihood of forming same-race unions versus interracial unions. When the definition of union was expanded to include direct marital first unions versus cohabiting first unions, results suggest that stronger intergenerational ties increased the likelihood of same-race versus interracial cohabiting first unions, but did not significantly influence same-race versus interracial direct marital first unions. Analyses by respondent race indicate few differences among Whites and non-Whites. These findings highlight the potential for parental influence on young adults' romantic relationships in an era of increasing family diversity.

Offspring Migration and Parents' Emotional and Psychological Well-being in Mexico.

In Mexico, offspring migration disrupts familial norms of coresidence and geographic proximity. This paper examines how offspring migration, both domestically and to the United States, affects the emotional and psychological well-being of parents who remain in the place of origin. Using nationally-representative longitudinal data from the Mexican Family Life Survey (N=4,718), we found limited evidence that parents whose offspring emigrated to the United States experience worse outcomes than parents of offspring who do not migrate. Although we found that offspring U.S. migration was not associated with changes in parents' overall depressive syndrome, a child's U.S. migration increased the likelihood of experiencing loneliness, and lead to a lower likelihood of recovery from parental sadness over time. Children's domestic migration did not affect parental well-being. These findings add to a growing body of literature that should be considered when assessing the broader impact of migration on family members who remain behind.

Step-grandparenthood in the United States.

Objectives: This study provides new information about the demography of step-grandparenthood in the United States. Specifically, we examine the prevalence of step-grandparenthood across birth cohorts and for socioeconomic and racial/ethnic groups. We also examine lifetime exposure to the step-grandparent role. Methods: Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Health and Retirement Study, we use percentages to provide first estimates of step-grandparenthood and to describe demographic and socioeconomic variation in who is a step-grandparent. We use life tables to estimate the exposure to step-grandparenthood. Results: The share of step-grandparents is increasing across birth cohorts. However, individuals without a college education and non-Whites are more likely to become step-grandparents. Exposure to the step-grandparent role accounts for approximately 15% of total grandparent years at age 65 for women and men. Discussion: A growing body of research finds that grandparents are increasingly instrumental in the lives of younger generations. However, the majority of this work assumes that these ties are biological, with little attention paid to the role of family complexity across three generations. Understanding the demographics of step-grandparenthood sheds light on the family experiences of an overlooked, but growing segment of the older adult population in the United States.

Adult children's education and changes to parents' physical health in Mexico.

The well-being of older adults is frequently tied to support from their adult children. Here, we assess whether the education of adult offspring is associated with changes to older parents' short- and long-term health in Mexico, a rapidly aging context with historically limited institutional support for the elderly. Educational expansion over the past half century, however, provides older adults with greater resources to rely on via the education of their children. Using longitudinal data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study (2001-2012), we find that offspring education is not associated with short-term changes in parents' physical functioning, but is associated with increased parental longevity, net of children's financial status and transfers. In addition, we find that mothers' longevity is more sensitive to offspring education than fathers. Our findings add to a growing body of literature that urges policy-makers to consider the multi-generational advantages of expanding educational opportunities in Mexico.

Adult Children's Education and Parents' Functional Limitations in Mexico.

This article asks how adult children's education influences older parents' physical health in Mexico, a context where older adults often lack access to institutional resources and rely on kin, primarily children, as a main source of support. Using logistic and negative binomial regression models and data from the first wave of the Mexican Health and Aging Study (N = 9,661), we find that parents whose children all completed high school are less likely to report any functional limitations as well as fewer limitations compared to parents with no children who completed high school. This association remains significant even after accounting for parent and offspring-level characteristics, including parents' income that accounts for children's financial transfers to parents. Future research should aim to understand the mechanisms that explain the association between adult children's education and changes to parents' health over time.

Take Me "Home": Return Migration among Germany's Older Immigrants.

This paper examines the determinants of return migration as foreign-born men approach old age in Germany. Return migration in later life engages a different set of conditions than return migration earlier on, including the framing of return as a possible retirement strategy. Using 23 years of longitudinal data from the German Socioeconomic Panel, this paper investigates how social and economic resources of immigrant men influence decisions to return "home." Results suggest that immigrants from former guest worker recruitment countries within the European Union are more likely to return than non-E.U. immigrants. In addition, return migrants are "negatively selected" such that those with the least education and weakest attachments to the labor force are more likely to emigrate. However, findings vary greatly depending on the immigrant's age and country of origin. Results from this paper highlight the heterogeneity of older immigrants and the factors that motivate their return "home."

Coresidence and Geographic Proximity of Mothers and Adult Children in Stepfamilies.

Children who live with or near a parent provide more care and receive more help from parents than geographically distant children. Stepfamily ties may be weaker than ties between biological kin, but little is known about the geographic proximity of step- versus biological kin. The authors used data from the Health and Retirement Study (N = 13,239 mothers and 45,675 biological and stepchildren) to show that stepchildren and stepmothers are less likely to live together, less likely to live nearby, and less likely to move closer than biological children and mothers. When mothers have only stepchildren, they are less likely to have a coresident child or a child nearby than mothers with both step- and biological children. Coresidence and geographic proximity are lower in stepfamilies formed after divorce than after widowhood. The findings are consistent with a legacy of conflict and strain and the likely competing needs of biological and stepmothers.