Advances in life course research最新文献

Despite the widespread experience of grandparenthood in later life, limited research has examined how subjective well-being evolves across the transition to grandparenthood over an extended period. Drawing on five waves of data from the China Family Panel Studies (2012-2022), this study applies a life-course approach to investigate sex-specific trajectories of emotional (i.e., mental health) and evaluative (i.e., life satisfaction) well-being from the pre-transition years through the birth of the first grandchild and into the early years of grandparenthood, as well as heterogeneity across key sociodemographic subgroups. Using fixed-effects models with discrete-time trends, four key patterns emerge. First, women show short- to mid-term improvements in emotional well-being beginning in the birth year, though estimates become less precise in later years and are weaker among non-coresident women. Second, men exhibit sustained increases in evaluative well-being from the birth year through six years afterward, with limited subgroup variation. Third, anticipatory associations are generally absent for both sexes. Fourth, unmarried women display larger well-being improvements than married women, whereas other moderators show minimal influence. Robustness checks indicate that these longitudinal patterns are unlikely to be driven by attrition bias, reverse causality, spurious temporal correlations, or omitted variables. Overall, the findings demonstrate that grandparenthood has sex-differentiated associations with well-being in contemporary China and stress the importance of gendered family roles and cultural expectations for understanding this transition and supporting active and healthy aging.

Life-course scholarship has documented the important role of educational aspirations in status attainment processes but has also revealed that parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations may negatively affect child development. However, it is unclear how parent-child mismatches in educational aspirations evolve over time. Here, we examine (1) the prevalence of mismatching aspirations across school grades 3-9 (ages 8-15), (2) their stability over time, and (3) whether converging aspirations tend to converge to parents' or to children's aspirations. We also investigate (4) whether parent-child mismatches in aspirations depend on the opportunities that a child is afforded in an education system that sorts pupils into distinct tracks, thus shaping educational trajectories and final educational attainment. We use data from two German National Educational Panel Study cohorts ("kindergarten cohort": N = 4217; "5th grade cohort": N = 3908). Findings indicate that in school grade 3, 30 % of parent-child dyads have mismatching aspirations; this percentage shrinks to 14-22 % across grades 4-9. Mismatching aspirations are relatively instable, indeed much less stable over time than matching aspirations. Among younger children, aspirations mostly converge to their parents' aspirations. Among older children, aspirations tend to converge in both directions. We also find that parent-child mismatches in aspirations vary considerably according to the educational track that the child ends up attending in secondary school. We conclude that parents and children incorporate the educational opportunities afforded to the child into their aspirations; aspiration mismatches evolve over time and as a result of institutional influences.