Two Parents = One Healthy Adulthood

• Post by: Bryce J. Christensen
• September 11, 2013

As national healthcare costs spiral out of control, few questions press themselves more insistently than those predicting long-term health. Investigating precisely such questions, a team of researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-San Francisco recently completed a study designed to determine what childhood circumstances put individuals on a trajectory of healthy living and what childhood circumstances propel individuals toward a lifetime of illness. The findings of this study underscore the long-term importance of an intact family in fostering good health. In order to identify the “social determinants of health across the lifecourse,” the California scholars parse data collected in 2007 and 2008 from an ethnically diverse sample of 400 men and women living in the San Francisco area. Through statistical analyses of these data, the researchers isolate a number of childhood circumstances that predict the quality of an individual’s adult health, measured through both self-rating and physical functioning. One of these circumstances—namely, the structure of the family in which a person experiences his or her childhood—merits particular attention. In simple bivariate models, the researchers find that a childhood spent with two parents strongly correlates with an adulthood of good health, whether measured by self-report (p = 0.0003) or by physical functioning (p = 0.001). What is more, these statistical linkages prove so robust that they persist in statistical models taking into account childhood and adult socioeconomic status. In other words, growing up with two parents fosters good long-term health even if those parents are not particularly well off. The California scholars conclude their study by opening the possibility of using an expanded version of their study design “for investigating the underpinnings of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in health status.”  Given the findings of this