The positive effects of parents' education level on children's mental health in Indonesia: a result of longitudinal survey

Background Mental health problems are associated with decreasing the quality of various aspects of life. Cases of mental health problems (e.g., depressive symptoms) have increased continuously. Researchers predicted depression to be the first cause of world burden diseases in 2030. One of the determinant factors of mental health is parents' education levels, but there have been contradictory research findings. The current research investigates the effect parental education attainment has on children's mental health. Methods We used public data from two waves of the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) conducted in 2007 and 2014. There were 767 participants aged 15-19 years old (M = 16.80, SD = 1.37) in 2007. All participants were re-interviewed in 2014. We examined the highest level of the parents' formal education in 2007 and the children's mental health in 2014 to find the longitudinal effects. We used depressive symptoms and happiness as representative variables of mental health. The structural equation model (SEM) was used to examine the hypothesis, and we prioritized predictive testing over the models' goodness of fit. We have built 12 models of combinations of children's and parents' sexes and different independent variables. Results The hypothesis testing showed the longitudinal effects that fathers' education in 2007 has on daughters' depressive symptoms in 2014 (beta = -.203, p < 0.01), while there were longitudinal effects from mothers' education in 2007 on their daughters' depressive symptoms (beta = -.163, p < 0.01) and sons' depressive symptoms (beta = .096, p <= 0.05) in 2014. Testing the happiness models showed that fathers' education in 2007 influenced the happiness of all of participants (beta = .167, p < 0.01), including both sons (beta = .206, p < 0.01) and daughters (beta = 149, p < 0.01). On the contrary, no significant correlation was found between mothers' education and children's happiness across all three categories of participants. Conclusions The general results of this study showed that parents' education levels were associated with their children's mental health, but there are different associations found through the different combinations of children's and parents' sexes.