Parental Education and Adolescent Self-Reported Physical Health

Abstract

GLEN H. ELDER, JR. University of North Carolina* Applying latent growth curve analysis to a sample of 350 adolescents, this study demonstrates that parents' education is linked to changes in adolescent self-reported physical health through the level of and changes in parental rejection. In addition, parents' education had a significant direct effect on subsequent changes in adolescents' self-reported health status. The results provide evidence for the influence of parents ' education on changes in the self-reported physical health of adolescents, both directly and indirectly through parental rejection. However parents' education is not associated with the initial level of adolescent self-reported physical health. Confidence in the findings is strengthened by employing a prospective, longitudinal research design; by analyzing intraindividual changes in parental rejection and adolescent health; and by using multi-informant reports of parental rejection. Earlier research demonstrates that education is a strong predictor of health status (Liberatos, Link, & Kelsey, 1988; Ross & Wu, 1995). There is additional evidence indicating that parents' education not only influences their own health status, but also influences the health of their children (Kurt, Kiang, & Dyer, 1996). In this study, we proposed that, in addition to direct effects, education affects adolescent health through its influence on the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship and particularly on parental rejection. Parental rejection represents emotional withdrawal of parents from their children and is expressed by parents' lack of warmth, their dislike, distrust, and constant dissatisfaction with their children (Brennan, 1974; Evoy, 1981; Whitbeck et al., 1992). Parents who reject their children also tend to be less effective, in general. They are less involved in parenting, and they demonstrate deficits in supervision, monitoring, and positive communication (Patterson, Reid, & Dishion, 1992). Thus, parental rejection severely disrupts the parent-child relationship and critical parenting processes. We expected parental education to be inversely related to parental rejection, which, in turn, was hypothesized to increase the risk of adverse health changes for adolescents. This study uses an analytic strategy that explicitly models individual trajectories of parental rejection and adolescent physical health (Rogosa, Brand, & Zimowski, 1982). Although changes in an individual attribute like physical health or emotional functioning often are inferred from associations between initial measurements and final outcomes, most previous studies have not addressed the continuous nature of change. Instead, they have yielded a static view of outcomes as a series of discrete snapshots linked by incremental changes (Karney & Bradbury, 1995). For this reason, we view and analyze changes in parental rejection and complaints of physical health during adolescence as interrelated and continuous individual trajectories (McLeod & Shanahan, 1996; Rogosa et al., 1982; Wickrama, Lorenz, & Conger, 1997; Willet, 1988). LINKING PARENTAL EDUCATION TO ADOLESCENTS SELF-REPORTED PHYSICAL HEALTH Our essential argument is that parents' education affects adolescents' self-reported health both directly and indirectly through parental rejection. Based on this theoretical model and using panel data, we examine how levels of adolescent selfreported health correspond with parents' education and levels of parental rejection. We also examine associations between parents' education and changes in parental rejection and adolescent selfreported health. Finally, we test the prediction that changes in adolescent self-reported health are associated with changes in parental rejection. We propose that parental education is directly related to adolescent self-reported health because, to a significant degree, child health is an outcome of the direct investment of parental knowledge and available resources (Becker, 1993). …