RT Journal Article
T1 The long-lasting effects of family and childhood on adult wellbeing: Evidence from British cohort data
A1 Lekfuangfu, Nuarpear
A1 Flèche, Sarah
A1 Clark, Andrew E.
AB To what extent do childhood experiences continue to affect adult wellbeing over the life course? Previous work on this link has been carried out either at one particular adult age or for some average over adulthood. We here use two British birth-cohort datasets (the 1958 NCDS and the 1970 BCS) to map out the time profile of the effect of childhood experiences on adult outcomes, including life satisfaction. We find that the effects of many aspects of childhood do not fade away over time but are rather remarkably stable. In both birth-cohorts, child non-cognitive skills are the strongest predictors of adult life satisfaction at all ages. Of these, emotional health is the strongest. Childhood cognitive performance is more important than good conduct in explaining adult life satisfaction in the earlier NCDS cohort, whereas this ranking is inverted in the more recent BCS.
PB Elsevier
SN 0167-2681
YR 2021
FD 2021-01-01
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/35153
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/35153
LA eng
NO Support from the US National Institute on Aging (Grant R01AG040640), the John Templeton Foundation and the What Works Centre for Wellbeing is gratefully acknowledged. We also thank CEPREMAP for financial support. For the BCS and NCDS data access, we are grateful to The Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL Institute of Education for the use of these data and to the UK Data Archive and UK Data Service for making them available
DS e-Archivo
RD 1 sept. 2024