Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The importance of life course influences on health differentials in later life has been increasingly recognised. Parenthood represents a major domain of most people’s lives with short and long-term implications. Apart from the physiological and psychological effects of pregnancy and childbirth, the health of both women and men may be influenced by stresses, role changes, and changes in allocation of personal and family resources associated with childrearing and by the emotional and social support benefits of parenthood. The associations of fertility history indicators on health have been rarely studied in familialistic countries such as Italy. In a familialistic country with strong family ties, frequent contact between generations may play a significant role in enhancing the role of parenthood against childlessness, especially for the subjective indicators of health. Additionally it should be stressed that familialistic countries are characterised by the unbalanced division of house and care work: women’s multiple roles may affect (positively for the “role enhancing theory” or negatively for the “role strain model”) the perception of their health status. This study aims to understand how fertility quantum and tempo components may have an effect on different health indicators (self-rated health, presence of limitations, ADL, IADL, and depression score) at ages 50 and above, controlling for a set of demographic and socio-economic indicators. We use data from the Italian Survey on Family and Social Relations 2009, and the pooled baseline interviews of the waves 1 and 2 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), for Italian respondents for whom information on their fertility history had been collected. We define individual fertility biographies by parity, early and late fertility, and spacing and explore their effect on both gender. These relations are analysed by taking different socio-economic indicators into consideration in order to control for these confounding factors. Our results provide additional insight on how fertility histories may influence health in later life. Concentration of fertility in low parities and a reduction of early pregnancies among younger cohorts of women may have a positive effect on health in the future, while men’s health seems not to be significantly influenced by fertility histories variables.

Walking (or gait) speed is an important measure of health and frailty among the elderly. Little, however, is known about the relationship between walking speed and family situation, another important determinant of health at old age. This study provides a longitudinal perspective of the predictive power of the current family situation, measured in terms of partnership and parenthood, on slow walking speed. We used the Swedish National Study on Aging and Care in Kungsholmen (SNAC-K) for persons aged 60 years and older, living in private or institutional households. We performed two types of GEE-regressions predicting slow walking speed in the follow-up by the characteristics of the previous wave, and the decline in walking speed between two waves by characteristics from the first of the two waves. We found that family situation at old age significantly predicts health in terms of slow walking speed; the relationship with changes in health is less clear. Among both sexes, having no children is related to slow walking speed albeit the effect is only statistically significant for men. In addition, childless persons living in a partnership showed the steepest decline in walking speed. For men there is a clear positive gradient between the amount of family resources and walking speed: the childless living alone have the slowest walking speed, those living in a partnership and have children have the highest. For women, no positive gradient exists. On the contrary, living in a partnership exerts a negative effect, both among the childless and among those with children.