The Effects of Co-Residence on the Subjective Well-Being of Older Chinese Parents

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of co-residence on the parental subjective well-being among older Chinese parents. Our analysis included 2968 elderly parents. Parental subjective well-being was stratified into positive well-being (PWB) and negative well-being (NWB). Positive well-being was assessed through questions about life satisfaction, optimism, and happiness and NWB was measured by questions about fear, loneliness, and feelings of uselessness. We found co-residence with adult children resulted in a significant average increase in PWB by 0.17 points relative to those who did not cohabitate. In rural China, co-residence with adult children significantly increased PWB by 0.19 points, and co-residence with a son significantly increased parental PWB by 0.18 points. Negative well-being fell significantly by 0.63 points if co-residence was with an adult daughter. Our findings imply that support from adult children significantly improved parental PWB, especially for the elderly in rural China. Public policies that facilitate the strengthening of cohabitation may help improve the well-being for older Chinese residents. Our study makes two main contributions to the international literature: first, we strengthened the causal inferences regarding the effects of co-residence with adult children on parental well-being through the use of a longitudinal study design; and second, we introduced a difference-in-differences propensity score matching (PSM-DID) approach to address potential selection bias that has previously been ignored in the literature.

Social participation and self-reported health in China: evidence from Chinese middle-aged and elderly adults

“…(1) * p < 0.1, ** p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01 (2) Dependent variable of health is an order category variable of subjective health (5 5 excellent, 4 5 very good, 3 5 good, 2 5 fair, 1 5 poor) (health 5 1, no 5 0). The order logit model is used (3) The control variables including age, education, married, urban, household income and smoker dummy variables are estimated, but these results are not shown in Table 4 (4) Basic model: variable in survey year (t period) is used; LVtÀ1: lagged variable in tÀ1 period is used; LVtÀ2: lagged variable in tÀ2 period is used Source(s): Calculated based on CHARLS 2011-2015 For an explanation of the SP-MH-SRH channel, Chou et al (2006), Chen and Short (2008), Miao and Wu (2019), Zhu et al (2019) and Matsuura and Ma (2020) reported that living alone may negatively affect well-being (co-residence with children may increase the well-being of parents). It can be considered that communication with others by participating in social activity may reduce the impact of being emotionally alone, particularly for single-person elderly households, which may improve the health status of the elderly.…”

“…At the same time, urbanization and economic development lead to more elderly single-person households (Matsuura and Ma, 2020). It has been pointed out that living alone may negatively affect the well-being of the elderly (Chou et al, 2006;Chen and Short, 2008;Miao and Wu, 2019;Zhu et al, 2019;Matsuura and Ma, 2020). Social participation is expected to improve the health status of elderly living in single-person households (Won and Kim, 2020).…”

Two Decades of Change in Living arrangements and Oldest Old Health in China, 1998-2018

“…In year 2016, the percentage of Hong Kong elders living with adult children became lower than 50.0% [48]. By studying sample of Mainland Chinese elders, researchers revealed that the proportion of respondents who coresided with an adult child declined by around 10.0% from 2008 to 2011 [49]. Xu's study [50] showed that the percentage of seniors living with their sons decreased, but the proportion of seniors living with daughters increased.…”

Happiness in Old Age: The Daughter Connection

“…Another study by Zeng et al ( 2016 ) documented that having daughters was more beneficial than having sons in terms of the health outcome of older parents. Furthermore, recent studies have found that, even in patriarchal societies such as China, living with daughters is associated with greater happiness of older parents (Yuan et al, 2021 ), or that co-residence with sons as well as co-residence with daughters are beneficial to parents’ subjective wellbeing (Zhu et al, 2019 ).…”

“… 1 Based on our literature search, we didn’t find any study that methodologically corrected for sex-selective abortion related biases and how that affects research on children’s gender and parental happiness in China. The only two studies that corrected for possible selection bias—Yuan et al ( 2021 ) and Zhu et al ( 2019 )—limit the focus to inter-generational co-residence status. …”