A New Look at the Recession and Ireland’s Older People: The Emigration of Adult Children and the Mental Health of their Parents

Abstract

Barrett and O'Sullivan (2014) showed that the well-being of Ireland's older people had not suffered over the course of the recent recession. While this may be the case on average, recent demographic research suggests that this aggregate view may have missed an important channel through which a recession can impact on older adults. Specifically, Antman (2010, 2011 and 2013) has shown how parents can suffer declines in mental health as a result of the emigration of their children. Given the high rates of emigration from Ireland as a result of the recession, it is important to explore if this effect has occurred. Using data from the first two waves of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), we explore whether the mental health of parents who saw children emigrate between 2009 and 2013 declined relative to parents whose children stayed in Ireland.Looking across three measures of mental health -depressive symptoms, self-rated mental health and indicators of loneliness -we find general and robust evidence of mental health declines for the mothers of emigrants. There is less evidence of fathers being affected with one exception -older fathers appear to experience a greater sense of loneliness as a result of the emigration of their children. We do not find evidence of the effect differing with the characteristics of the children, such as whether they are male or female or whether they lived with their parents immediately prior to emigration.