New research by Esther Friedman of the RAND Corporation and Robert Mare of UCLA finds that parents of college grads live two years longer than parents whose kids didn’t graduate high school. That two-year bump in life expectancy for parents of the most-educated kids is surprisingly large — it amounts to about two-thirds of the longevity benefit of running every day.
Even more surprising: your kids’ educational attainments have a bigger effect on your life expectancy than your own schooling. While sending your kid to college adds two years to your life relative to letting them flunk out of high school, getting a college degree yourself only adds 1.7 years to your life compared to not having a high school degree.
The authors discovered that the relationship between children’s education and parents’ lifespan “is more pronounced for deaths that are linked to behavioral factors and that may be more preventable: most notably, chronic lower respiratory disease and lung cancer.” This suggests that college-educated children are able to influence their parents’ behavior in positive ways: “Highly educated offspring may directly improve their parents’ health by convincing them to change their health behaviors.”
Because of the strong correlation between education and income, college-educated adults are also better-equipped to provide care for their parents in old age. Offspring who themselves need assistance because of poor health or limited financial resources are less likely to provide for their parents,” the authors write.
