Research On The Effects And Mechanisms Of Intergenerational Caregiving On The Mental Health Of Middle-aged And Older Adults

The advent of an aging population has led to a demographic shift,and the changing function of family childcare and the lagging development of existing social childcare services have led to the increasing involvement of middle-aged and older adults in intergenerational care.With the full implementation of the "threechild" policy,the traditional family concept has led the younger generation to view the middle-aged and elderly as the rightful caregivers,thus neglecting their own health,especially their mental health,when caring for their grandchildren.In this context,it is necessary to explore the impact of intergenerational caregiving on the mental health of caregivers at a time when active ageing and healthy ageing are being advocated,and some existing studies have focused more on the impact of intergenerational caregiving on the physical and self-rated health of middle-aged and older people,and have yet to expand on the mechanisms by which intergenerational caregiving affects mental health.Based on this,this paper has investigated how intergenerational caregiving affected the psychological health of middle-aged and elderly people,with the intention of regulating intergenerational caregiving,improving China’s child care system,maintaining the psychological health of middle-aged and elderly people,and contributing to the policy of active and healthy ageing.In order to study how intergenerational caregiving affects the psychological health of middle-aged and elderly people and its mechanism of action,this paper constructed a model of the impact of intergenerational caregiving on the psychological health of middle-aged and older adults based on the theory of role strain,theory of role accumulation and social exchange theory,using CHARLS2018 data as the basis,with full reference to previous theoretical and empirical studies,and empirically analyzed the impact of intergenerational care on the psychological health of middle-aged and elderly people.Based on this,in order to comprehensively measure the impact of intergenerational caregiving,the independent variables were replaced with caregiving intensity and regressed on the duration of caregiving and the number of grandchildren cared for as measures,confirmed the study’s findings through robustness tests using propensity score matching,and overcame endogeneity issues using an instrumental variables approach.On top of this,this study further explored and examined the mechanism of the effect of intergenerational caregiving on the psychological health of middle-aged and older adults from the perspective of social interaction and intergenerational support from children.To generalize the findings,the study then looked at the differences in the health effects of intergenerational caregiving on different groups of middle-aged and older adults from the perspectives of gender and place of residence,taking into account the differences in the samples with different characteristics.The study concluded that intergenerational caregiving has a statistically significant positive effect on the mental health of middle-aged and older adults.This was evidenced by higher cognitive scores and reduced depression in middle-aged and older adults who provided intergenerational care.The positive effect of intergenerational caregiving on the mental health of middle-aged and older adults was found to be underestimated by testing instrumental variables.In the examination of the mechanisms of the effect of intergenerational care on the psychological wellbeing of middle-aged and older adults,the positive effects of intergenerational caregiving on the psychological well-being of middle-aged and older adults are transmitted through but not exclusively through social interactions and intergenerational child support.By providing intergenerational care,middle-aged older people increase their own social interactions and facilitate intergenerational financial and emotional support from their children,and these effects feed back into better cognitive abilities and lower levels of depression in middle-aged adults,as reflected in role accumulation and social exchange theories.Heterogeneity by place of residence and gender revealed that the positive effects of intergenerational care on mental health are more pronounced overall for urban middle-aged people,while depression is significantly improved for rural middle-aged people;intergenerational care promote the mental health of female middle-aged people more than that of male middle-aged people.Based on the findings of this study,this paper combined the micro-family context with the macro-social context and proposed countermeasures to encourage children to share family responsibilities,bring into play the role of the community in intergenerational care,build a universal child care system,formulate a flexible delayed retirement policy and promote social interaction among the middle-aged and elderly,with a view to improving their the psychological health while reasonably promoting their participation in intergenerational care and promoting the goal of active ageing.