The Effects of Parental Health Shocks on Adult Offspring Smoking Behavior and Self‐Assessed Health

Abstract

An important avenue for smoking deterrence may be through familial ties if adult smokers respond to parental health shocks. In this paper, we merge the Original Cohort and the Offspring Cohort of the Framingham Heart Study to study how adult offspring smoking behavior and subjective health assessments vary with elder parent smoking behavior and health outcomes. These data allow us to model the smoking behavior of adult offspring over a 30-year period contemporaneously with parental behaviors and outcomes. We find strong 'like father, like son' and 'like mother, like daughter' correlations in smoking behavior. We find that adult offspring significantly curtail their own smoking following an own health shock; however, we find limited evidence that offspring smoking behavior is sensitive to parent health, with the notable exception that women significantly reduce both their smoking participation and intensity following a smoking-related cardiovascular event of a parent. We also model the subjective health assessment of adult offspring as a function of parent health, and we find that women report significantly worse health following the smoking-related death of a parent. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The intergenerational transmission of health in the United States: A latent variables analysis

“…Probably, the paper that is closest to this and Halliday et al (2018) is Andersen (2018) who, in work subsequent to ours, estimates similar models using Danish registers and finds that there is even more health mobility in Denmark than in the United States. Other work by Darden and Gilleskie (2016) finds a significant transmission of smoking behaviors across generations in the Framingham Heart Study. Other work by Darden and Gilleskie (2016) finds a significant transmission of smoking behaviors across generations in the Framingham Heart Study.…”

“…Earlier work finds that the intergenerational correlation in life spans is on the order of 0.15-0.30 (e.g., Ahlburg (1998); Yashin and Iachine (1997)). Other work by Darden and Gilleskie (2016) finds a significant transmission of smoking behaviors across generations in the Framingham Heart Study. Work by Johnston, Schurer, and Shields (2013) investigates intergenerational associations in mental health in the British Cohort Study and estimates correlations between 0.13 and 0.15.…”

The Impact of Maternal Mental Health Shocks on Child Health: Estimates from Fixed-Effects Instrumental Variables Models for Two Cohorts of Australian Children

“…Also employing US data, Bauldry et al (2012) examine the associations between parental health conditions and self-rated health of children from adolescence to young adulthood and Thompson (2014) estimate the correlation of same specific chronic health conditions between parents and their young children. Recently, Darden and Gilleskie (2015) study the effects of parental health shocks on self-rated health of US adult offspring.…”

Smoking and Mortality: New Evidence From a Long Panel

“… 10 See Smith et al (2001); Sloan et al (2002); Darden (forthcoming); Darden and Gilleskie (2016). An important difference between our work, which focuses on accurately estimating the impact of smoking on mortality, and these recent papers is that 1) our data follow individuals frequently (every two years) throughout much of their adult lifetime (up to 46 years vs. 28 years (7 waves) or less) and 2) nearly all individuals are observed until death (88 percent vs. up to 30 percent).…”