Lee Ah-Reum, Romero K Renata Flores, Torres Jacqueline
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco, USA.
SSM Popul Health. 2025 Jul 23;31:101846. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2025.101846. eCollection 2025 Sep.
The educational achievements of offspring are reported to be positively associated with the wellbeing of older parents, although observational research on this topic is likely subject to residual confounding bias. We use data on over 7,000 older adults who responded to the Korean Longitudinal Study on Aging (KLoSA), a population-based study that captures data on the wellbeing and family dynamics of adults 45 years along with detailed rosters of respondents' living children, including their age and educational attainment. We use these rosters to characterize offspring exposure to a 1993 higher education reform that increased college enrollment rates, particularly for young women, by over 45 percentage points over a decade. Prior research has leveraged this reform to identify the causal effects of college completion on women's fertility and labor market outcomes; we similarly demonstrate its utility as a natural experiment in our study, showing a meaningful discontinuity in the college completion of respondents' daughters based on exposure to the reform. We show that college completion among daughters reduced the risk of depression for older parents by 6-25% (with variation by parents' gender and model specification) but had no effects on ratings of life satisfaction. The returns to offspring college completion were most pronounced for older mothers, parents in living urban regions and those with fewer of their own household assets. Daughter's college completion also had an impact on some domains of intergenerational support that could explain effects on depressive symptoms, including the frequency of parent-child contact.
据报道，子女的教育成就与老年父母的幸福感呈正相关，尽管关于这一主题的观察性研究可能存在残余混杂偏差。我们使用了超过7000名参与韩国老年纵向研究（KLoSA）的老年人的数据，这是一项基于人群的研究，收集了45岁及以上成年人的幸福感和家庭动态数据，以及受访者在世子女的详细名册，包括他们的年龄和教育程度。我们利用这些名册来描述子女受1993年高等教育改革的影响情况，该改革在十年内使大学入学率提高，尤其是年轻女性的入学率提高了超过45个百分点。先前的研究利用这项改革来确定大学毕业对女性生育和劳动力市场结果的因果效应；我们同样证明了它在我们研究中作为自然实验的效用，表明根据对改革的接触情况，受访者女儿的大学毕业情况存在有意义的不连续性。我们表明，女儿大学毕业使老年父母患抑郁症的风险降低了6%-25%（因父母性别和模型设定而异），但对生活满意度评分没有影响。子女大学毕业带来的回报在老年母亲、居住在城市地区的父母以及家庭资产较少的父母中最为明显。女儿大学毕业也对代际支持的某些方面产生了影响，这可以解释对抑郁症状的影响，包括亲子接触的频率。
