Cumulative Childhood Adversity Educational Attain

Authors: Jennifer Karas Montez Mark D Hayward

Publish Date: 2013/11/27

Volume: 51, Issue: 2, Pages: 413-435

PDF Link

Abstract

Studies of the earlylife origins of adult physical functioning and mortality have found that childhood health and socioeconomic context are important predictors often irrespective of adult experiences However these studies have generally assessed functioning and mortality as distinct processes and used crosssectional prevalence estimates that neglect the interplay of disability incidence recovery and mortality Here we examine whether earlylife disadvantages both shorten lives and increase the number and fraction of years lived with functional impairment We also examine the degree to which educational attainment mediates and moderates the health consequences of earlylife disadvantages Using the 1998–2008 Health and Retirement Study we examine these questions for nonHispanic whites and blacks aged 50–100 years using multistate life tables Within levels of educational attainment adults from disadvantaged childhoods lived fewer total and active years and spent a greater portion of life impaired compared with adults from advantaged childhoods Higher levels of education did not ameliorate the health consequences of disadvantaged childhoods However because education had a larger impact on health than did childhood socioeconomic context adults from disadvantaged childhoods who achieved high education levels often had total and active life expectancies that were similar to or better than those of adults from advantaged childhoods who achieved low education levelsJennifer Karas Montez thanks the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Society Scholars program for its financial support This study was also supported by Grant 1 R01HD053696 PI Robert A Hummer and Grant 5 R24 HD042849 awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development The authors thank the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for thoughtful critiques and suggestions A previous version of this article was presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the Population Association of America and the 2012 Aging with Disability Conference supported by Grants P30 AG034464 awarded to Syracuse University and P30 AG012846 awarded to the University of Michigan from the National Institute on Aging

Keywords: