Does Children’s Union Dissolution Hurt Elderly Parents? Linked Lives, Divorce and Mental Health in Europe

Marco Tosi () and Marco Albertini ()
Additional contact information
Marco Tosi: London School of Economics and Political Science
Marco Albertini: University of Bologna

European Journal of Population, 2019, vol. 35, issue 4, No 3, 695-717

Abstract: Abstract Previous research has shown that parent’s union dissolution has negative consequences for individuals’ well-being, parent–child relationships and children’s outcomes. However, less attention has been devoted to the effects in the opposite direction, i.e. how children’s divorce affects parents’ well-being. We adopted a cross-country, longitudinal and multigenerational perspective to analyse whether children’s marital break-up is associated with changes in parents’ depressive symptoms. Using data from 17 countries and 5 waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (2004–2015), fixed effect linear regression models were estimated to account for time-constant social selection processes into divorce/separation. The results show that across European contexts parents’ depressive symptoms increased as one of their children divorced. Furthermore, we found that parents living in more traditional societies, such as Southern European ones, experienced higher increases in depression symptoms when a child divorced than those living in Nordic countries. Overall, the findings provide new evidence in support of both the notion of “linked lives” and a normative perspective of family life course events.

Keywords: Divorce; Intergenerational relations; Mental health; Depression; Linked lives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10680-018-9501-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurpop:v:35:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1007_s10680-018-9501-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10680

DOI: 10.1007/s10680-018-9501-5

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Population is currently edited by Helga A.G. de Valk

More articles in European Journal of Population from Springer, European Association for Population Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().