Uncovering the Heterogeneity of the Effects of Adult Children's Unemployment on Their Parents' Mental Health in Europe

Jordi Gumà , Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics
Anna Baranowska-Rataj, Umeå University
Bruno Arpino, Università Di Padova

In the current landscape of population aging, where intergenerational coexistence is prolonged, investigating how children's employment status influences parents' mental health furthers the knowledge on older adults’ well-being from a multi-actor perspective. We aim at analyzing how parental features (individual level) and societal context (contextual level) moderate the intensity of the relationship between children's employment status and parents' mental health. For this purpose, we analyze data from the fifth and sixth waves of the panel Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) combined with macro data on social policies from the Social Policy Indicators database. We estimate the Conditional Average Treatment Effect using Causal Forests by combining the calculation of the individual propensity score that a child becomes unemployed with a cluster-robust Random Forests to elucidate the potential heterogeneous effect of this on depression symptoms of parents by country of residence. Preliminary results uncover a significant increase in the number of depressive symptoms among parents when one of their children becomes unemployed after controlling for their propensity to experience this event. Parent’s features have the strongest predictive capacity of the EUROD values, while contextual variables considered at this point display just a residual effect

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 Presented in Session 118. Flash Session Families, Partnerships and Health