Adult health returns to education by key childhood social and economic indicators: Results from representative European data

Abstract

In the United States, associations between attained education and adult health typically are larger for those from disadvantaged childhood backgrounds. However, it remains unclear how specific key childhood indicators contribute to these adult health patterns, especially outside the United States. Drawing on the 2014 European Social Survey (20 countries; N=31544), we investigate the key childhood and adolescent indicators of parental education, childhood financial strain, and any serious household conflict growing up, given how these early exposures are known to correlate strongly with both educational attainment and adult health. In regressions with country fixed effects, we find across Europe that higher levels of education are more strongly linked to lessened adult depressive symptoms when childhood disadvantage is present in terms of lower levels of parental education or higher childhood financial strain specifically. However, adjusted predictions reveal that childhood financial strain contributes to this heterogeneity in educational returns far more strongly than parental education. For self-rated health, only childhood financial strain enhances estimated educational health benefits when considering all key childhood social and economic factors jointly. Similarly, childhood financial strain in particular enhances educational protection against overall rates of disease in adulthood. Overall, our findings support prior work on United States data revealing higher educational health returns given childhood disadvantage. At the same time, our findings across three distinct adult health indicators suggest the particular importance of childhood financial strain to understanding heterogeneity in educational health returns.