The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: Evidence from British cohort data

The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: Evidence from British cohort data. SarahFlèche, Warn N. Lekfuangfu, Andrew E. Clark. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, April 18 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2018.09.018

Abstract: To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average over adulthood. We here use two British birth-cohort datasets (the 1958 NCDS and the 1970 BCS) to map out the time profile of the effect of childhood experiences on adult outcomes, including life satisfaction. We find that the effects of many aspects of childhood do not fade away over time but are rather remarkably stable. In both birth-cohorts, child non-cognitive skills are the strongest predictors of adult life satisfaction at all ages. Of these, emotional health is the strongest. Childhood cognitive performance is more important than good conduct in explaining adult life satisfaction in the earlier NCDS cohort, whereas this ranking is inverted in the more recent BCS.

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6. Conclusions

There is now increasing interest in not only the contemporaneous correlates of subjective well-being but also the distal correlates. We here use two UK birth cohorts, the 1958 NCDS and the 1970 BCS, to show how family background and childhood variables are related to life satisfaction measured at a variety of adult ages.

There are first a number of similar findings across the two cohorts. Perhaps the most important one is that there is little evidence that the distal determinants of adult well-being change over time: the childhood factors that predict life satisfaction in the 20s predict it just as well in the 40s and beyond. The effect of childhood and family does not then fade away over time. In both cohort datasets, it is childhood emotional health that is the strongest predictor of adult life satisfaction.

The predictors of adult life satisfaction are not entirely the same in the BCS and NCDS, however. In particular, the role of childhood intellectual performance is weaker in the later cohort, while the effect of childhood behaviour is stronger (childhood behaviour is not significantly correlated with adult life satisfaction in the NCDS).

When we add adult outcomes, we find that adult emotional health has the largest correlation with adult life satisfaction at all ages in both datasets, but there is little independent role for education. There are again some notable differences: family is more important in the NCDS than in the BCS (although the family effect is notably larger in the latter for respondents in their 30s). Physical health is less important in general in the NCDS, but its coefficient does increase sharply for the respondents at age 50.

The adult outcomes mediate the effect of childhood. Almost all of the effect of childhood intellectual performance works via these adult outcomes, and over half that of childhood emotional health. The figure for childhood behaviour is smaller.

Our results underline the importance of emotional health, both in adulthood and childhood, in determining adult life satisfaction. More broadly, they show that interventions that affect adult outcomes, given childhood and family background, can improve adult well-being, and so can interventions that target the childhood outcomes themselves. There is thus a role for policy all through the lifetime.

The correlations that we find here are similar for our two UK cohorts. But we still only know how to predict the life satisfaction of middle-aged British respondents. That the correlations are similar over adult ages is a useful finding, but one that we would like to extend to older ages. Equally, these results refer to only one country, and their replication elsewhere is part of a current broad international effort to use cohort datasets to inform policy about the causes of well-being throughout life.