Adult children’s educational attainment has an impact on their parents’ mental and physical health, according to a new study.

The researchers used a new wave of data from a survey launched in 1994 to further extend the geometry linking educational attainment and health that demonstrates another dimension of the intergenerational effects of completing college.

“By analyzing these data we arrived at the conclusion that it was detrimental to parents‘ self-reported health and depressive symptoms if none of their children completed college,” says Christopher Dennison, assistant professor of sociology in the University at Buffalo, and a coauthor of the paper in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences. “The negative mental health outcome of the parents was in fact our strongest finding.”

Dennison and coauthor Kristen Schultz Lee, an associate professor of sociology, have both used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) in their previous research. Add Health, a nationally representative longitudinal study of over 20,000 adolescents, is the largest such survey of its kind.

There was an initial wave of data on the parents (ages 30-60) when the survey began and another wave of data from roughly 2,000 of those original participants (now ages 50-80) gathered from 2015-17.

Read the full article about the health benefits of college degrees for parents by Bert Gambini at Futurity.