WHAT PREDICTS A SUCCESSFUL LIFE? A LIFE-COURSE MODEL OF WELL-BEING.

Policy-makers who care about well-being need a recursive model of how adult life-satisfaction is predicted by childhood influences, acting both directly and (indirectly) through adult circumstances. We estimate such a model using the British Cohort Study (1970). We show that the most powerful childhood predictor of adult life-satisfaction is the child's emotional health, followed by the child's conduct. The least powerful predictor is the child's intellectual development. This may have implications for educational policy. Among adult circumstances, family income accounts for only 0.5% of the variance of life-satisfaction. Mental and physical health are much more important.

Parental unemployment and children's happiness: A longitudinal study of young people's well-being in unemployed households.

Using a unique longitudinal data of British youths we estimate how adolescents' overall happiness is related to parents' exposure to unemployment. Our within-child estimates suggest that parental job loss when the child was relatively young has a positive influence on children's overall happiness. However, this positive association became either strongly negative or statistically insignificant as the child grew older. The estimated effects of parental job loss on children's happiness also appear to be unrelated to its effect on family income, parent-child interaction, and children's school experience. Together these findings offer new psychological evidence of unemployment effects on children's livelihood.