Previously submitted to: JMIR Mental Health (no longer under consideration since Aug 25, 2020)
Date Submitted: Aug 24, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Intergenerational financial supports and the mental health of the elderly in China
ABSTRACT
Background:
With the increasing of the elderly population, the mental health problems of the elderly have attracted the attention of scholars. Although the risk factors from the adulthood of mental health have been widely explored in existing studies, how factors from both adulthood and childhood, especially financial supports received impact mental health are still unknown.
Objective:
This paper aims to investigate the impacts of intergenerational financial supports from both adulthood and childhood on mental health of the elderly in China.
Methods:
This paper collects information of 1,587 respondents who are 65 and older from two-wave data of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) to conduct the empirical analysis.
Results:
Our results indicate that financial supports as a whole significantly influence elderly people’s mental health. Specifically, individuals have different loneliness and depression levels due to different family financial conditions in childhood and financial supports from children in adulthood. Moreover, financial supports in adulthood negatively moderate the relationship between the family financial condition and the mental health of elderly people.
Conclusions:
The findings point to the importance of continued inter-generational financial support in maintaining the elderly’s psychological health. Raising the retirement income or appeal to children to provide supports to the elderly can promote the mental health of the elderly, especially for these elderly people with poor family financial conditions in their childhood.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.