Does Children's Education Improve Parental Health and Longevity? Causal Evidence from Great Britain

Abstract

Parents with better-educated children are healthier and live longer, but whether there is a causal effect of children’s education on their parents’ health and longevity is still unclear. Previous research has been largely associational and was thus not able to account for all circumstances that confound children’s education and parental longevity. First, we demonstrate an association between adults' offspring education and parental mortality in the 1958 British birth cohort study, which remains substantial - about two additional years of life - even when only comparing parents with similar socio-economic status. Second, we use the 1972 educational reform in England and Wales, which increased the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years, to identify the presence of a causal effect of children’s education on parental health and longevity using census-linked data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS). Results reveal that children’s education has only very limited causal effects on a wide range of outcomes related to parental mortality and health. We interpret these findings against the backdrop of universal and free health care and the role of education in socio-economic inequality in Great Britain.

Children’s education and parental old-age health: Evidence from a population-based, nationally representative study in India

“…More recently, a handful of quasi-experimental studies have identified causal effects of children's education on parental health. In high-income settings, such as Sweden, additional children's education has generally led to modest and heterogeneous protective effects on parental mortality (Lundborg and Majlesi 2018;Potente et al 2018). In contrast, in low-resource settings, substantial benefits of children's education have been identified.…”

Does Children’s Education Improve Parental Longevity? Evidence From Two Educational Reforms in England

“…Parents of better-educated children are healthier and live longer. This association has been observed across high-income such as the United States, Finland, Taiwan and the United Kingdom, as well as in low and middle income countries, including China (Elo et al, 2018;Friedman and Mare, 2014;Lee et al, 2017;Potente et al, 2022). The reasons behind this association are unclear.…”

“…Lundborg and Majlesi (2018) exploit an educational reform in Sweden and find no effect of education on parental longevity across the board, however for fathers, having better-educated daughters is beneficial, particularly if fathers come from poorer backgrounds. Potente et al (2022) use linked census data to analyze the 1972 educational reform in England. They do not find an effect of eligibility to the reform on mothers or fathers, neither for self-reports of health nor for mortality.…”

“…We revisit the English case by using a different data source-the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA, -that allows us add make three further steps for this particular context: 1) we exploit the 1947 educational reform in addition to the 1972 reform; 2) we examine differences between sons and daughters; and 3) we go beyond the intent-to-treat-effects reported by Potente et al (2022).…”

“…Existing research using exogenous variation largely focused on low-and middle-income countries (Cornelissen and Dang, 2022;De Neve and Fink, 2018;Ludwig et al, 2021;Ma, 2019;Ma et al, 2021). The exceptions are Lundborg and Majlesi (2018), who find spillover effects for some very specific parent-child constellations in Sweden, and Potente et al (2022), who find no causal effect of children's education on parental mortality in England and Wales. Thirdly, we provide a full replication and extension of the study by Potente et al (2022) using an alternative data source.…”