Baojing Li, Can Liu, Ylva B Almquist, and Lisa Berg have published a new multigenerational cohort study entitled, Parental childhood factors as mediators of multigenerational socioeconomic and psychosocial risks: A cohort study of three generations.
There has been increasing research interest into the multigenerational associations between grandparental socioeconomic disadvantages, such as low educational attainment and disadvantaged social class, and grandchild psychiatric outcomes, including depression and alcohol-related disorders. However, there is still limited evidence on the mechanisms by which multiple factors in the parental generation link grandparental socioeconomic disadvantages to grandchild psychiatric disorders, and existing research has primarily focused on the parental adulthood life stage rather than childhood experiences.
This study aims to further disentangle such multigenerational mechanisms by exploring the role of parental childhood factors. We utilized a three-generational cohort study design with data from the Stockholm Birth Cohort Multigenerational Study. The sample included 2 708 individuals born in 1953 (parental generation, G1), their 5 416 parents (grandparental generation, G0), and 5 967 children (grandchild generation, G2).
The researchers established the significant mediating role of parental childhood experiences – family relationship quality, peer relationships, and educational performance – in the multigenerational pathways from grandparental socioeconomic disadvantages to parental adult psychosocial disadvantages, and further onto grandchild psychiatric disorders. This study thus highlighted the multigenerational effects of grandparental socioeconomic disadvantages as well as the potential protective influences of positive parental childhood factors, where school performance acted as a central pathway in buffering the multigenerational transmission of disadvantages.
Read more: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2025.100526