Adult child educational attainment and older parents' psychosocial outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Older adults' psychosocial outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic have been inequitable by socio-economic status (SES). However, studies have focused solely on own SES, ignoring emerging evidence of the relationship between adult child SES and late-life health. We evaluated whether adult child educational attainment - a core marker of SES - is associated with older parents' psychosocial outcomes during the pandemic. METHODS: We used data from the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) 2004-2018 and the SHARE Corona Surveys (SCS) 2020 and 2021. We included 40,392 respondents ≥ 65 years who had pre-pandemic information on adult child educational attainment and self-reported psychosocial outcomes during the pandemic, including self-assessments of worsened psychosocial outcomes compared to the pre-pandemic period. We used generalized estimating equations with a Poisson distribution and a log link, adjusted for respondent and family-level characteristics, including respondents' own educational attainment. RESULTS: Older adults whose adult children averaged levels of educational attainment at or above (vs. below) their country-specific mean had a lower prevalence of feeling nervous (Prevalence Ratio [PR] 0.94, 95% Confidence Interval [CI] 0.90, 0.97), sad or depressed (PR 0.94, 95% CI 0.91, 0.98), and having sleep problems (PR 0.94, 95% CI 0.90, 0.97) during the pandemic. Additionally, higher adult child educational attainment was associated with a lower risk of perceiving worsened feelings of nervousness (PR 0.95, 95% CI 0.90, 1.01) and worsened sleep problems (PR 0.91, 95% CI 0.82, 1.01) as compared to the pre-pandemic. In stratified models, protective associations were observed only in countries experiencing "high" levels of COVID-19 intensity at the time of the survey. All of these results are derived from adjusted models. CONCLUSIONS: Adult child SES may have "upward" spillover effects on the psychosocial wellbeing of older parents during periods of societal duress like the pandemic.