Parental education, health literacy and children’s adult body height

Abstract

Human anthropometric traits, while significantly determined by genetic factors, are also affected by an individual’s early life environment. An adult’s body height is a valid indicator of their living conditions in childhood. Parental education has been shown to be one of the key covariates of individuals’ health and height, both in childhood and adulthood. Parental functional literacy has been demonstrated to be another important determinant of child health, but this has largely been overlooked in studies on height. The objective of this study was to analyse the associations between parents’ education, their functional literacy and their children’s adult body height. The study used data for 39,240 individuals from the 2016 wave of the nationally representative Life in Transition Survey (LITS) conducted in 34 countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. Using linear and Poisson models, regression adjustment treatment estimators and multilevel mixed-effects linear regressions, the study analysed the links between mother’s and father’s educational attainment, parental functional literacy, measured by the number of books in the childhood home, and children’s adult height. The models also included other individual and contextual covariates of height. The results demonstrated that mother’s educational attainment and parental functional literacy have independent associations with children’s adult body height. Sufficient literacy skills of the parent may have a positive effect on children’s growth even if parental education is low. These associations remained significant across time. The study also provides evidence of a widening of the height gap for men born in the period just before and after systemic transition in post-socialist societies, which may suggest an increase in social differences in early living standards.

Social Mobility, Health and Wellbeing in Poland

“…Based on the absolute measure of height, we generated quartiles calculated separately by gender and 10-years birth cohorts. Next, we created binary variables for those whose height fell within the bottom quarter and for those whose height appeared in the top quarter of the distribution in the respective gender and birth cohort ( Jarosz and Gugushvili, 2020 ). The described relative height indicator of those who are the shortest or tallest among their peers is a crude measure of individuals’ initial health.…”

Why do people perceive themselves as being downwardly or upwardly mobile?

“…Gapminder is arguably the only comparative dataset which provides information on the level of economic development for most years of the 20th century for each country included in LITS. This allows me to derive information on the level of economic development for individuals who were born even before the Second World War (Jarosz and Gugushvili, 2019). To understand how change in economic performance between individuals’ birth years and 2010 is associated with their perceptions of intergenerational mobility, I calculate the difference between these two measures (mean 9068, SD 8142).…”

Exigencia de altura: un estudio sociológico sobre las preferencias de talla en jóvenes filipinos seleccionados en base a relaciones heterosexuales

“…Taller men, therefore, could imply good physical health and longevity (Wang et al, 2017;Kordsmeyer and Penke, 2017;Jarosz and Gugushvili, 2019;Floud et al, 2011), and is positively correlated with reproductive success (Sear, 2010;Conroy-Beam and Buss, 2019;Furnham and McClelland, 2015;Plavcan, 2011;Stulp, et al, 2015). It has been reported that tall males are selected by women in the fertile phase (Wood and Carden, 2014), have more attractive partners (Brewer, 2017), and they do date more often (Skrindaet al, 2014;Buunket al, 2019;Wood and Carden, 2014).…”