The Education of Multiple Family Members and the Life-Course Pathways to Cognitive Impairment

OBJECTIVES: This article asks how the educational attainments of multiple family members, including parents and offspring, are associated with the cognitive health of older adults in the United States. METHODS: We use panel data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (2000-2012) to examine how the education of an individual, their parent(s), and their offspring are associated with the prevalence of moderate/severe cognitive impairment and the onset of cognitive impairment among older adults using logistic regression and discrete-time event history analysis, respectively. RESULTS: We found that when combined, only the education of the individual is inversely associated with cognitive impairment at baseline. However, both the educational attainments of an individual and their offspring are negatively associated with the risk of becoming cognitively impaired, among individuals who were not already cognitively impaired. Conversely, parental education was not predictive of being cognitively impaired or the onset of impairment. Furthermore, we found that respondent gender did not moderate the relationship between a family member\u27s education and respondent cognitive health. DISCUSSION: This study adds to current research by asking how resources from earlier and subsequent generations matter for older adults\u27 cognitive health. Although we found little evidence that parental education matters at this life stage, results suggest that offspring education has a salient positive effect on later-life cognitive health. This finding underscores an overlooked source of health disparities-offspring resources-and highlights how a family perspective remains a powerful tool for understanding health inequalities in later life

Offspring Educational Attainment and Older Parents\u27 Cognition in Mexico

Population-level disparities in later-life cognitive health point to the importance of family resources. Although the bulk of prior work establishes the directional flow of resources from parents to offspring, the linked lives perspective raises the question of how offspring resources could affect parental health as well. This paper examines whether adult children\u27s education influences older parents\u27 (aged 50+) cognitive health in Mexico, where schooling reforms have contributed to significant gains in the educational achievements of recent birth cohorts. Harnessing a change in compulsory school laws and applying an instrumental variables approach, we found that each year of offspring schooling was associated with higher overall cognition among parents, but was less predictive across different cognitive functioning domains. More offspring schooling improved parents\u27 cognitive abilities in verbal learning, verbal fluency, and orientation, but not in visual scanning, visuo-spatial ability, or visual memory. The beneficial effects of offspring schooling on those cognitive domains are more salient for mothers compared to fathers, suggesting potential gendered effects in the influence of offspring schooling. The results remained robust to controls for parent-child contact and geographic proximity, suggesting other avenues through which offspring education could affect parental health and a pathway for future research. Our findings contribute to growing research which stresses the causal influence of familial educational attainment on population health

Family Obligation Across Contexts: Hispanic Youth in North Carolina and Southern California

Over the past decade, the Hispanic population has grown in areas with little to no history of recent immigration. Prior research comparing Hispanics in new and established destinations has chiefly focused on differences in socioeconomic indicators of assimilation. Our paper departs from this work by shifting the focus to sociocultural outcomes. Specifically, we use data from Los Angeles and North Carolina to examine differences in the strength of family obligation (N=552). We find that demographic characteristics explain all of the geographic difference in family obligation between these locations. However, we also find that co-ethnic concentration is positively correlated with adolescents’ endorsement of future family support, once ethnic identity is included in the analysis

The education of multiple family members and the life course pathways to cognitive impairment

OBJECTIVES: This article asks how the educational attainments of multiple family members, including parents and offspring, are associated with the cognitive health of older adults in the United States. METHODS: We use panel data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study (2000–2012) to examine how the education of an individual, their parent(s), and their offspring are associated with the prevalence of moderate/severe cognitive impairment and the onset of cognitive impairment among older adults using logistic regression and discrete-time event history analysis, respectively. RESULTS: We found that when combined, only the education of the individual is inversely associated with cognitive impairment at baseline. However, both the educational attainments of an individual and their offspring are negatively associated with the risk of becoming cognitively impaired, among individuals who were not already cognitively impaired. Conversely, parental education was not predictive of being cognitively impaired or the onset of impairment. Furthermore, we found that respondent gender did not moderate the relationship between a family member’s education and respondent cognitive health. DISCUSSION: This study adds to current research by asking how resources from earlier and subsequent generations matter for older adults’ cognitive health. Although we found little evidence that parental education matters at this life stage, results suggest that offspring education has a salient positive effect on later-life cognitive health. This finding underscores an overlooked source of health disparities—offspring resources—and highlights how a family perspective remains a powerful tool for understanding health inequalities in later life