Separated kin: location of multiple children and mental health trajectories of older parents in rural China

Abstract

Objective

This study examines the longitudinal association between the location of multiple children and depressive symptoms of older parents in rural China, where massive rural-to-urban migration has profoundly altered the family life of the aging population.

Methods

Using seven waves of panel data from the Longitudinal Study of Older Adults in Anhui Province (2001–2018, N = 8,253) and multilevel growth curve models, this study compares mental health trajectories of old parents across different compositions of local and migrant children over an 18-year time period.

Results

The results show that older parents with a greater share of adult children who had migrated away not only scored worse mental health on average, but also experienced a more rapid increase in depressive symptoms across ages, after accounting for other covariates. Further, older adults who had their most children migrated away for a longer period of time suffered from the steeper rate of increase in depressive symptoms as they got older.

Conclusions

We suggest that it is not the geographic locality of a single child but the location of multiple children that matters for parental mental health in later life.

Keywords:

• Intergenerational proximity
• multiple children
• rural China
• depressive symptoms

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In an exploratory analysis, we further restricted analytical sample to older parents who had at least two or three adult children, and results were largely identical.

2 Parents with the same number of migrant and local children were combined with those with more sharing of migrant children into the same category because preliminary analyses yielded very similar results for these two groups.

3 In our preliminary analysis, we tried maximum, minimum, and mean scores and the results are largely similar.

4 We conducted additional sensitivity analyses to examine the functional shape of age trajectory of depressive symptoms with different parametrizations (linear, quadratic, and cubic). We found that a linear measure of age provided the best fit to the data (results available upon request).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant 2020YFC2003000), the National Institute on Aging (Grant P30AG066614) and the U.S. Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant P2CHD042849). Data collections was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 71573207, 72074177).