Assets and Life Satisfaction of Older Korean Parents: Mediating Effects of Multiple Children’s Adult Status Attainment

Abstract

This study examined if the association between older parents’ assets and life satisfaction is mediated by multiple children’s adult status attainment, given increasingly complicated processes of transition to adulthood and diminishing returns for parents’ extended investment in adult children. Disparate bodies of literature have indicated that assets help promoting older adults’ individual health and well-being; and parental assets also facilitate children’s reaching of adulthood. However, little attention has been paid to the ways in which the association between assets and life satisfaction might be explained by multiple children’s adult role statuses. Using the 5th wave of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2014), this study analyzed a sample of parents aged 60 years and older with at least one living child aged between 30 and 50. For analyses, mediation models were estimated using SPSS PROCESS. Results showed that the association between non-financial assets and life satisfaction was partially mediated by one or more grown children’s college graduation and home ownership. Children’s employment, marriage, and parenthood did not play a major role in explicating the link between assets and life satisfaction in the contemporary socioeconomic context of Korea. Regarding policy and practice implications, comprehensive asset-building programs should be offered for parents to financially prepare for old age; parents should be informed that their overall life quality may hinge less on the lives of their children than might be typically expected, thus necessitating a more tailored approach to financially supporting their children during their transition to adulthood.