Linked Lives: Adult Children’s Assortative Mating and Older Parents’ Depressive Symptoms in China

Drawing on the linked lives perspective, patterns of adult children’s marriage matching may profoundly influence older parents’ well-being. Despite its significance, the links between adult children’s marriage matching and older parents’ subjective well-being remain understudied. This study examines such relationships in China. We hypothesize that the influences of assortative mating may be gendered, due to the greater emphasis on sons’ importance in old-age support than daughters’ and the norm for women to marry up. Given the strong association between marriage matching and inequality, the links between children’s marriage matching and parents’ well-being may differ across education and hukou (household registration) status.

We use data from the 2012 China Family Panel Studies (n = 4,365) and employ diagonal mobility models to estimate the impacts of assortative mating by adult children’s education and hukou origin on older parents’ depressive symptoms.

The descriptive results suggest that matching of hukou has a stronger association with older parents’ depressive symptoms than matching of education. As hypothesized, the results of the diagonal mobility models show that adult children’s hukou-education status matters more than their spousal hukou-education status in predicting parents’ depressive symptoms. Contrary to our expectations, once the effects of adult children’s own and spousal hukou-education statuses are accounted for, marrying up or down, being a daughter or son, and being an only child or not do not seem to matter in parents’ depressive symptoms.

In China, adult children’s compatible matches with their spouses and an urban hukou are protective of parents’ mental well-being, suggesting the perceived centrality of assortative mating and the hukou system in maintaining socioeconomic status. While this study offered no evidence for a gendered association between adult children’s marriage matching and parental psychological health, we caution against writing off this hypothesis due data limitations.