HOW PARENTS' LOVE SHAPES CHILDREN'S LIVES

Parents often put their own relationship on the back burner to concentrate on their children, but a recent study shows that love matters because when spouses love each other, children tend to stay in school longer and marry for life.

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Research about how the affection between parents shapes their children’s long-term life outcomes is rare because of the difficulty in collecting long-term data. However, a study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan and McGill University in Quebec has used unique data from families in Nepal to provide new evidence.

The study used data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study in Nepal. The survey launched in 1995 and collected information from 151 neighborhoods in the Western Chitwan Valley. Married couples were interviewed simultaneously but separately, and were asked to assess the level of affection they had for their partner.

The researchers then followed the children of these parents for 12 years to document their education and marital behaviors. The researchers found that the children of parents who reported they loved each other either “some” or “very much” stayed in school longer and married later.

“Family isn’t just another institution. It’s not like a school or employer. It is this place where we also have emotions and feelings,” said Lead Study Author Sarah Brauner-Otto, Director of the Centre on Population Dynamics at McGill University. “Demonstrating and providing evidence that love, this emotional component of family, also has this long impact on children’s lives is really important for understanding the depth of family influence on children.”

The researchers speculated that when parents love each other, they tend to invest more in their children, leading to children remaining in education longer, with the children’s home environments also likely to also be happier when parents reported loving each other.

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