Links between elevated mental well-being in adulthood and higher social and economic resources growing up are well established. However, the role of gender remains unclear, especially whether gender influences how social and economic resources interact to produce disparities in mental well-being across young adulthood. Drawing on nationally representative longitudinal data, we illuminate gender differences in mental well-being, finding that young adult mental health advantages based in adolescent socioeconomic status pivot on parent-child emotional bonds for young men only. That is, for young adult men, lessened depressive symptom frequency linked to higher parental education only appears when perceived parent-child bonds are at least moderately close. This holds even after adjusting for earlier adolescent mental well-being, suggesting a stable mechanism across the transition to adulthood. Overall, our results uphold the argument that familial social and economic resources predict mental well-being during young adulthood while revealing that relevant mechanisms may differ by gender.
Maternal religiosity is associated with children's religiosity even as they grow into adults. Yet, experiencing the death of one's mother during the transition to adulthood could modify the transmission of maternal religiosity across the life course. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), I find that the relationship between mother loss and religiosity is bidirectional. Results from longitudinal models of child religiosity across the transition from adolescence to adulthood show that mother loss is negatively associated with service attendance but is positively associated with salience. Further, mother loss predicted higher frequency of prayer among bereaved children at lower levels of maternal religiosity but lower prayer frequency at higher levels of mothers’ religiousness. Overall, these findings direct attention to differences in the associations between mother loss and indicators of religiosity and to the interplay between mother loss and maternal religiosity as important factors in the transmission of religiosity across generations.
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