Offspring and later-life loneliness in Eastern and Western Europe

Abstract

Later-life loneliness is increasingly recognized as an important public health issue. In this study, we examine whether having more children and grandchildren is protective against later life loneliness in a group of Eastern and Western European countries. Drawing on data from the Generation and Gender Surveys, we estimated logistic regression models of the likelihood of being lonely among men and women aged 65 and older. The results showed a negative association between number of children and loneliness among men and women in both Eastern-European and Western-European countries. A mediation analysis performed using the KHB decomposition method showed that grandparenthood status partly explained differences in the loneliness risks of childless women, mothers with one child and those with two or more children. Among men, the mediating role of grandparenthood was significant in Eastern Europe and marginally significant in Western countries. Given the relatively strong reliance of older people on the family in Eastern Europe, we expected that the protective effects of offspring on loneliness would be stronger in Eastern-European countries than in Western-European countries. This hypothesis was supported only in part by our results. The protective effect of having four or more children was larger in the East than in the West. Overall, our findings indicate that having close family members, including more children and at least one grandchild, has a protective effect against later-life loneliness in both country clusters considered.

The More the Merrier? The Causal Effect of High Fertility on Later-Life Loneliness in Eastern Europe

“…However, we showed that the effect of additional children was significantly underestimated in this model. Several factors known from the literature to be protective against loneliness, e.g., high socio-economic status (Van den Broek et al 2019;Victor et al 2005), are traditionally also associated with lower completed fertility (Isen and Stevenson 2010;Kravdal and Rindfuss 2008). Failure to properly account for such factors will result in underestimation of the impact of high fertility on later-life loneliness.…”

“…Compared to these qualitative aspects of parenthood, the links between number of children and loneliness-the focus of the current study-have received little scholarly attention. The small body of research in which these links have been assessed tends to show a weak negative association between number of children and feelings of loneliness in later life (De Jong Gierveld et al 2012; De Jong Gierveld and Van Tilburg 2010; Hansen and Slagsvold 2016; Pinquart and Sörensen 2001;Van den Broek et al 2019). Null-findings have, however, also been reported for the combined Bulgarian/Russian/Georgian subsample in one study (De Jong Gierveld et al 2012) and for Dutch and German samples in other studies (De Jong Gierveld et al 2009;Stevens and Westerhof 2006).…”

“…It is well-established that the prevalence of loneliness among older people is relatively high in Eastern Europe (De Jong Gierveld and Tesch-Römer 2012; Hansen and Slagsvold 2016;Van den Broek et al 2019;Yang and Victor 2011). Loneliness is the negative experience of a discrepancy between the number and quality of the relationships that one desires and those one actually has (De Jong Gierveld et al 2006;Peplau and Perlman 1982).…”

“…Earlier work in which the links between fertility and loneliness has been estimated has tended to adopt a descriptive approach (e.g., De Jong Gierveld et al 2012;Hansen and Slagsvold 2016;Stevens and Westerhof 2006;Van den Broek et al 2019). Results from these studies should be interpreted with caution, because both fertility and loneliness are strongly socially patterned.…”

The formal demography of kinship II: Multistate models, parity, and sibship

“…On the other hand, loneliness in late life is associated with a variety of adverse health conditions and increased mortality risks (e.g., Valtorta et al, 2016). van den Broek, Tosi, and Grundy (2019) report that, in both Eastern and Western Europe, increased numbers of children and the experience of having at least one grandchild, was associated with a reduced risk of late-life loneliness.…”