Jacqueline Torres Associate Professor, Epidemiology & Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco

Lifecourse epidemiology has long recognized the importance of intergenerational influences on health. However, the direction of these influences is typically described as flowing downward, from one generation to the next (e.g. from parent to child). A rapidly emerging body of scholarship from economics, sociology, and public health has begun to consider the reverse – that is, whether the socioeconomic status and resources of adult children flow ‘upward’ to influence the outcomes of their older parents. I will present both quasiexperimental and observational evidence on this topic that largely focuses on the impacts of adult child socioeconomic status (e.g. educational attainment) on older parents’ health and wellbeing, including in the context of chronic disease and the COVID19 pandemic. I will also touch on extensions of this work to other dimensions of social policy that might directly target young and middleaged adults, with potential spillover effects on middleaged and older parents.

Captions are autogenerated and may contain errors.