Intergenerational Relationship and Psychological Well-Being: What Differs for Two Generations

Background and Purpose: In spite of rapid demographic and social changes, elderly people and their children in China can hardly live completely independently with each other. Families with elderly people encounter challenges today, especially in terms of intergenerational relationships. While providing or receiving a certain kind of support is good for elderly people, it may not benefit their children as support providers or receivers, and vice versa. Very few studies investigate the association between intergenerational relationship and its psychological consequences for both generations, which overlooked the importance of considering different role players in an intergenerational interaction process. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to provide a bi-directional perspective for observing intergenerational relationship and its psychological consequences. It is aimed to address a research question - what is the relation between intergenerational relationship and psychological well-being for elderly people and their children respectively?

Methods: Applying data from the latest wave (2012) of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we conducted multivariate OLS regression analyses for elderly parents and their children respectively. The baseline wave (2010) of CFPS is a national multistage probability sample of Chinese families. We restricted our sample to 2421 parent-child dyads, of which both elderly parents (60+) and their corresponding children had individual questionnaires answered. In our study, intergenerational relationship is operationalized as support exchange (i.e. providing and receiving financial support, housework help and grandparenting/caregiving), and quality of relationship. In addition, psychological well-being refers to life satisfaction and depression-level, which were measured by a single-item scale and the CES-D scale respectively.

Results: From elderly parents’ perspectives, providing housework help and receiving financial support and having a close relationship with their child significantly increase their life satisfaction. Additionally, grandparenting and receiving care from children increase elderly depression levels, while close relationship helps to decrease their depression levels. By contrast, from child’s perspective, receiving financial support and grandparenting decrease child’s life satisfaction, whereas receiving housework help and providing financial support increase it. Moreover, both receiving housework help and grandparenting increase child’s depression level. Close relationship is not related to child’s life satisfaction, but is a buffer against depression.

Conclusions and Implications: This study has three main outcomes: (1) It is beneficial for life satisfaction of both generations if the elderly provide housework help to their children and their children provide financial support to their elderly parents. (2) Grandparenting is detrimental for psychological well-being of both elderly people and their children, which suggests that there may be more conflicts arising between elderly people and their children while grandparenting. (3) Intergenerational relationships of good quality benefit psychological well-being of both generations. At a practical level, this study indicates the importance of proposing service programs to enhance intergenerational solidarity as well as empower elderly people with their ability of contributing to families in their late life. Finally, supportive services of child care are supposed to be provided to families with young grandchildren.