Happy and Healthy Within the Family Structure

Our well-being partly depends on the family constellations we are embedded in. The intergenerational position is particularly decisive, a new study says.

Our well-being depends heavily on the family constellations in which we live, especially our position in the generational structure. Studies show that family relationships play a key role in health and well-being throughout the life course, especially in old age. The study by Bettina Hünteler and Karsten Hank shows that these effects are complex and that multiple role transitions within a family system are crucial. People with a small “kinship reservoir” are more likely to suffer from physical impairments, while people in three-generation families are less likely to suffer from depression and physical impairments.

 

Family can bring joy but also be strenuous. Studies prove that family relationships play a key role in people's well-being and health. This applies across life, but especially to older ages. These studies show that older-age health and well-being is influenced not only by current family relationships but also by family ties in earlier phases of life. It is also known that well-being is closely linked to transitions within the family, especially birth and death. Past studies have mostly focused on the impact of individual role changes in the family, such as parental loss or entry into parenthood or grandparenthood, on health and well-being. This approach, however, disregards that most people have several such transitions (e.g., by the loss of parents, the birth of children or even grandchildren). It also ignores that each of these transitions occurs within a family system in which a person can have not just one but several roles at the same time.

Bettina Hünteler from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and her colleague Karsten Hank from the University of Cologne now counter this approach with a new study published in the specialist journal Ageing and Society. Hünteler uses a new concept she developed herself to categorize people within the structure of their intergenerational family, the so-called "generational placement trajectories.” These trajectories also reflect the "kinship reservoir"; it consists of parents, children and grandchildren and can be used for support in times of crisis. Some people experience a trajectory with barely any change in their generational placement: They merely lose their role as a child, i.e., when their parents die.  And they never become parents or grandparents themselves. Other people, however, find themselves rapidly climbing up the "generational ladder” – from being a child to being a parent to being a grandparent – while maintaining several roles simultaneously, most often two at the same time. For some, a shift in role comes early in life (e.g., when the parents die or grandchildren are born), for others it comes late.

Based on representative survey data, the researchers identified six clusters that reflect typical such family trajectories: There are the childless, who divide into two groups, namely those who lost their parents early and those who did so later in life. But most people do have children and thus move up the "generational ladder" when they become parents. There are those who remain in the two generations cluster for long, i.e., whose parents die relatively early after the birth of their own children and prior to the birth of their own grandchildren. The three generations cluster is one where people lose their parents at a time when they themselves enter grandparenthood. This group further divides into those for whom this transition comes early in life and those for whom it comes late. The four generations cluster follows a similar transition ordering, but the persons observed enter the role of grandparent prior to the death of their own parents, so that for some time they have the family roles of being a child, a parent, and a grandparent simultaneously.

Hünteler and Hank used data from the German Ageing Survey (DEAS) for their study. DEAS is a nationally representative cross-sectional and longitudinal survey of people aged 40 to 85. It provides comprehensive information on various dimensions of well-being as well as demographic data on the parents, children, and – from 2008 onwards – the grandchildren of the respondents. The researchers thus were able to examine four distinct physical and psychological aspects of health and well-being: life satisfaction, depression, functional limitations, and physical health problems.

Overall, the analysis revealed a complex interplay between the roles experienced within the family (e.g., "being a grandparent"), the timing of role transitions (e.g., "becoming a grandparent"), the number of simultaneous roles (e.g., "being a parent and grandparent"), and the relationship with health and well-being. Hünteler and Hank found several correlations between the family structures and health and well-being. These correlations cannot simply be used to infer causal relationships, but they do at least point to possible dependencies, according to Hünteler and Hank. They noticed, for example, that people with a small "kinship reservoir" are more likely than the average to suffer from higher levels of functional limitations and health problems. People in the three generations cluster, by contrast, are less prone to suffer from depression and functional limitations. At the same time, the timing of intergenerational role transitions in the family seems to be relevant too: For example, the health of childless people who suffer parental loss early in life is worse than the health of childless people whose parents die later.

This finding is consistent with the results of other studies that have shown adverse life events such as parental death to have a distinctively negative effect on well-being when they occur significantly earlier than expected, Hünteler and Hank state. The results show that next to shaping family relationship (e.g., by the frequency of contact), generational placement can also be decisive for people's long-term well-being.

This article was first published on June 26, 2024, in the newsletter Demografische Forschung aus Erster Hand. 

The Newsletter is available in German only.

"Demografische Forschung Aus Erster Hand" is a joint publication of the Max Planck Institute for demographic Research (MPIDR), the Rostocker Zentrum zur Erforschung des Demografischen Wandels (RZ), the Vienna Institute of Demography (VID), the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital and the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB).