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Extracted abstract

Unemployment is not only a significant risk for the mental health of those affected but also to their interlinked family members, such as their parents. Recent studies have shown a negative association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health, drawing on mechanisms based on linked lives and stress processing within the intergenerational family. However, the role of the broader economic context for this association, particularly regarding prevailing family support cultures, remains less understood. Therefore, our study aims to investigate the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health in 12 European countries with varying (de)familism regimes before, during, and after the Great Recession of 2008. Using longitudinal panel data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we analysed 14,954 parents and their 26,382 children over 5 SHARE waves from 2004 to 2015 (N = 92,667) applying pooled longitudinal and fixed-effects linear probability regression. We found significant mental health declines in mothers with their children's unemployment, which was, however, not generally moderated by the economic context. The associations varied across European regions and (de) familism regimes, particularly for mothers in Southern Europe when accounting for individual confounding. Our study provides novel and robust evidence for intergenerational mental health effects of family economic stress, especially in more familistic regime contexts.

Introduction

Unemployment states an adverse life event, exposing affected individuals to financial strain, loss of social status, and non-compliance with their social roles (Strandh et al., 2014) , often resulting in declined mental health (Paul and Moser, 2009) . A large body of research has investigated that the spillovers of the adverse mental health consequences of unemployment on children (cf. Moustgaard, Avendano and Martikainen, 2018; Högberg, Baranowska-Rataj and Voßemer, 2024) and partners o of those experiencing unemployment (cf. Siegel et al., 2003; Baranowska-Rataj and Strandh, 2021) . Whether these negative mental health effects also extend to their parents remains less understood.

A few studies in the US (Greenfield and Marks, 2006; Milkie, Bierman and Schieman, 2008) , the UK (Albertini and Piccitto, 2023) and Europe (Gumà-Lao and Baranowska-Rataj, 2023) have investigated the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health. Their findings suggest an overall negative mental health response to children's unemployment, particularly in mothers. The explanation for these findings anchors on an emotional-i.e. parents experience increased empathy for and worries about their child (Hay, Fingerman and Lefkowitz, 2008; Stein et al., 2011) -and a normative dimension-i.e. parents suffer from the disappointment towards their child (Kalmijn and De Graaf, 2012; Uccheddu and Van Gaalen, 2022) . However, both explanatory dimensions are not universally applicable and probably depend strongly on the present economic conditions and the prevailing family support culture, referred to as (de)familism regime. Except one study that considers national unemployment rates in their analysis (Albertini and Piccitto, 2023) , existing research mainly neglects these two contextual forces and their interplay in explaining perception of children's unemployment and eventually their mental health responses.

To address this research gap, our study aims to investigate the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health before, during, and after the Great Recession of 2008 across European (de)familism regimes (Figure 1 ). In doing so, we adopt a comparative approach and utilize longitudinal panel data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) from 2004 to 2015 with information on intergenerational family members from 12 European countries (Figure 1 ), enabling us to ask the following research questions:

(1) What is the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health? (2) Does this association vary with the progression of the Great Recession of 2008? (3) Does this association differ between (de)familism regimes, overall and with the recession?

Our study contributes to the current state of research in various ways: first, we provide new empirical evidence for the association between children's unemployment

Figure 1 Countries included in this study in groups according to regional (de)familism regimes clustering

Source: own visualization.

ADULT CHILDREN'S UNEMPLOYMENT AND PARENTS' MENTAL HEALTH

and their parents' mental health, promoting the general understanding of the mental health consequences of unemployment in the intergenerational family; second, we consider a longitudinal study design and observe the association before, during and after the Great Recession in Europe, obtaining a more in-depth understanding of the progression of unemployment effects on mental health over time and varying economic conditions; and third, we adopt a comparative approach, deepening the comprehension of family support cultures and their role for intergenerational transmission of adverse labour market trajectories.

Background

Understanding the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health

Initial empirical evidence suggest the intergenerational upward transmission of mental health responses to unemployment from the child to the parent generation (Greenfield and Marks, 2006; Milkie, Bierman and Schieman, 2008; Albertini and Piccitto, 2023; Gumà-Lao and Baranowska-Rataj, 2023) and is theoretically supported by the family life course approach. The family life course approach extends the general life course approach-that conceptualizes how contextual exposures over the life time may affect individuals and their life course outcomes (Elder, 1998) -by recognizing the influence of family ties. Specifically, an individuals' life course progression is assumed to be affected by that of their family members, who are connected through their kinship and social and emotional relationships. The connection between parents and children is thereby assumed to exist far beyond the legal and normative obligations of a child's upbringing or the caretaking for the ageing parents (Elder, Johnson and Crosnoe, 2003) . The linked lives principle (Carr, 2018) captures the interdependence between parents and children over their life courses and conceptualizes how significant life course shifts and events experienced by an individual may spill over to their interlinked family members (Macmillan and Copher, 2005) .

The occurrence and accumulation of adverse life events, such as unemployment, generally exposes individuals to increased social stress, i.e. defined as individuals' inability to meet excessive life demands (Pearlin, 1989) . The experienced stress may-in accumulation or extensive exposure-lead to mental health problems in the affected individuals (Pearlin, 1989 (Pearlin, , 2010) ) that arise from ineffective coping mechanisms, potentially transmits to their parents through their emotional interlinkage and social interaction (Pearlin, 1999 (Pearlin, , 2010)) .

The few existing empirical studies that investigate the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health suggest an overall negative association, particularly for mothers (Greenfield and Marks, 2006; Milkie, Bierman and Schieman, 2008; Albertini and Piccitto, 2023; Gumà-Lao and Baranowska-Rataj, 2023) . While the pathways of spillover effects of unemployment within a household mainly focus on distress disrupting family functioning (see Family Stress Model; Conger et al., 2012; Masarik et al., 2016; Masarik and Conger, 2017) , the theoretical explanations for intergenerational spillovers mainly centre dimensions of parents' emotional and normative responses to their children's unemployment.

First, the emotional dimension focuses on parents' feelings of empathy with and increased worries about their unemployed children, potentially resulting in increased distress and negative mental health responses. Previous studies emphasized the predominant role of children's financial situations among general parental worries (Hay, Fingerman and Lefkowitz, 2008; Stein et al., 2011) . At the same time, increased worries about their children were found to worsen parents' sleep quality (Wang et al., 2020) and increase their feelings of anxiety and depressed moods (Stein et al., 2011) . Empirical evidence by Greenfield and Marks (2006) and Gumà-Lao and Baranowska-Rataj (2023) supported the emotional dimension to explain parents' mental health responses to their children's unemployment: parents' psychological wellbeing particularly declined with their children's accumulation of unemployment-related problems such as financial strain and difficulties in finding or keeping a job (Greenfield and Marks, 2006) and mothers' evolved depressive symptoms in the event of children's unemployment independent of normative expectations regarding the child's birth order or gender (Gumà-Lao and Baranowska-Rataj, 2023) .

Furthermore, the evident gender differences in parents' mental health responses to their children's unemployment with mothers showing more pronounced mental health declines than fathers (Albertini and Piccitto, 2023; Gumà-Lao and Baranowska-Rataj, 2023) may provide further indication of an emotional explanation drawing on socialized emotional and social role norms. Mothers typically display stronger empathy in their social connections (Rueckert and Naybar, 2008) , maintain closer relationships with their adult children (Kahn, McGill and Bianchi, 2011) , and traditionally provide more emotional support to them (Fingerman et al., 2009) than fathers. Moreover, as unemployment has been linked to a decline in the quality of the parent-child relationship (Bertogg and Szydlik, 2016) , it is likely that mothers bear a greater emotional burden from their children's unemployment. These gendered patterns in parents' emotional response to children's unemployment suggest that the emotional dimension is a key factor in understanding parents' mental health responses to their children's unemployment.

Second, the normative dimension in explaining the association between adult children's unemployment and their parents' mental health concerns parents' social role disappointment in their children and themselves as well as the emerging stigma around unemployment, potentially leading to increased distress and subsequent negative mental health responses. Parents' negative perception of their children's unemployment leads thereby back to disappointed role expectations towards the adult child, as also shown in relation to other norm-violating life course events, such as union dissolution (Kalmijn and De Graaf, 2012; Uccheddu and Van Gaalen, 2022) . Specifically, parents may relate their children's unemployment with adult status disruption and financial dependence (Suitor and Pillemer, 2006) , a failure of their parenting success (Milkie, Bierman and Schieman, 2008) , and additionally fear social sanctions due to the stigma surrounding unemployment (Danckert, 2017) . Findings by Albertini and Piccitto (2023) support this conclusion as parents' self-rated mental wellbeing is rather affected by the occurrence of their children's unemployment than by the resulting financial strain or the pathway into unemployment (Albertini and Piccitto, 2023) . Similarly, Tosi and Grundy (2018) confirmed the relevance of unemployment as a social norm violation as children's return to the parental household following unemployment had a more substantial effect on parents' self-rated quality of life if they returned to an empty nest and in contexts of little intergenerational co-residence tradition, i.e. in Northern European countries (Tosi and Grundy, 2018) .

Guided by the presented explanations of parents' mental health responses to their children's unemployment, we hypothesize that children's unemployment is negatively associated with their parents' mental health (Research Question 1).

Contextual differentials of children's unemployment and their parents' mental health

Contextual differentials in the association between adult children's unemployment and their parents' mental health, particularly regarding the two main pathways along emotional and normative dimensions, are currently understudied. In the following, we present two determining contextual forces in the pathway from children's unemployment to their parents' mental health: first, the present economic conditions, and second, the prevailing family support cultures, i.e. (de)familism regimes.

The role of economic conditions

First, a country's present economic conditions may have a significant influence on the perception of children's unemployment and their parents' mental health responses (Albertini and Piccitto, 2023) . Specifically, the present labour market situation may moderate the association between parents' mental health and their children's unemployment, i.e. affect the direction and magnitude of the association. The moderating effect of the economic conditions likely acts through the stigmatization of unemployment (Clark, 2003; Danckert, 2017; Heyne and Voßemer, 2023) and employment security (Kopasker, Montagna and Bender, 2018) , thereby affecting parents' perception of their children's unemployment and their subsequent mental health responses, and can adopt both directions, amplifying or attenuating parents' mental health response.

On the one hand, periods of economic decline with high unemployment might establish a 'social norm of unemployment' (Clark, 2003) , reducing the stigma attached to children's unemployment and subsequently the emotional burden perceived by parents. More precisely, the increase in unemployment in an individual's social environment, which is likely increased during periods of higher unemployment, leads to a normalization of unemployment and potentially reduces stigma attached to it (Danckert, 2017; Baranowska-Rataj and Strandh, 2021; Heggebø, 2022) . Parents thereby might perceive their children's unemployment as a less shameful or blameful event (Heyne and Voßemer, 2023) , and such a shift in evaluating children's unemployment could ease their emotional strain. This mechanism might be particularly relevant for individuals in higher socioeconomic strata, where unemployment is more of a norm-violating event than in lower strata (Schuring et al., 2013) and perceived even worse during periods of low unemployment.

On the other hand, unemployment during periods of economic decline may pose higher levels of distress on the affected individuals due to decreased re-employment prospects and general economic certainty (Taris, 2002; Frasquilho et al., 2015 Frasquilho et al., , 2016)) , negatively affecting the wellbeing of unemployed individuals during economically tense periods (Oesch and Lipps, 2013) . Moreover, austerity measures during these periods might introduce additional stressors for individuals experiencing unemployment (Bambra, 2019; Curtis et al., 2021) . This double burden of unemployment during periods of economic decline might also spillover to the parents of affected individuals (Bünnings, Kleibrink and Weßling, 2017; Bosakova et al., 2019; Altweck et al., 2021) and harm their mental health, as demonstrated in the study by Albertini and Piccitto (2023) .

Particularly severe periods of economic declines, such as recessions or economic crises, may even exacerbate this double-burdening effect of unemployment due to the severely insecure situation (Leamer, 2008; Gaski, 2012) and harm the mental health of the workingage population (Bartoll et al., 2014; Frasquilho et al., 2015) . A recent economic crisis in Europe was the ADULT CHILDREN'S UNEMPLOYMENT AND PARENTS' MENTAL HEALTH Great Recession, which started after the 2008 global financial crisis all across Europe and was accompanied by considerable economic decline and unemployment (Blankenburg and Palma, 2009) , particularly in Southern European (Carrasco et al., 2016) . Various studies on the Great Recession in Europe have confirmed the tremendous impact on the mental health of the working-age population (Bartoll et al., 2014; Frasquilho et al., 2015) but intergenerational spillover effects to, for example, the parent generations remain understudied.

The comprehensive understanding of the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health therefore requires an investigation of the role of the economic context and its moderation effect (Research Question 2).

The role of family support cultures and (De) Familism regimes

Second, the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health may differ along prevailing (de)familism regimes. (De)familism refers to the socio-cultural and political prioritization of the family regarding financial and care dependencies within a social welfare structure (Esping-Andersen, 1999) . The cultural conception of the intergenerational family in the European context is thereby rooted in the family interlinkages of individuals, prioritizing the family as an exchange network of emotional and support resources (Lück and Castrén, 2018) . (De)familism regimes are expressed in prevailing social support norms and established social policy and legislation, all of which focus on the family as the primary unit responsible for social care provision (Leitner, 2003) . Therefore, the degree of (de)familism is determined through the extent to which individuals are dependent on their family system regarding social care (Lohmann and Zagel, 2016) -i.e. the more central the family is for any social care matters, the higher the prevailing degree of familism and vice versa. Thereby, Northern and Central-Western European welfare regimes exhibit less and Southern and Central-Eastern European regimes more familistic social structures (Esping-Andersen, 1999; Leitner, 2003) .

The influence of (de)familism on individuals depends on the investigated policy dimension, as family members' social care and support functions vary across life domains (Lohmann and Zagel, 2016) . At the same time, the (intergenerational) family has established a safety net with varying downward support tailored to children's individual employment experiences (Manzoni and Gebel, 2024) . Relating the concept to children's unemployment, the degree of (de)familism may aid in explaining variations in parents' perceived emotional and material responsibility for their children and the resulting emotional strain leading to potential mental health effects (Gumà-Lao and Baranowska-Rataj, 2023) . Thereby, the (de)familistic values prevailing in a cultural context may influence both the socialemotional normative expectations towards parents of children experiencing unemployment-i.e. how much they are expected to be emotionally involved and offer material support-as well as the necessity for the parents to provide material support to their children-i.e. the material support needed given the available welfare benefits and the resulting strain for the parents. Depending on the (de)familism regime, the emotional or material responsibility for a child experiencing unemployment may vary in its consequences for parents' wellbeing: Fulfilling parental role responsibilities in caring for family members in need may be perceived as role conformity and lead to social rewards in more familistic regimes, which is not necessarily the case for parents in less familistic regimes (Akaeda, 2018) . The consequences of the support reactions to children's unemployment for parents' wellbeing are thereby likely clustered in the prevailing (de)familism regime.

During periods of economic decline, (de)familism cultures also determine the extent to which families might compensate declining welfare support. Austerity measures during the Great Recession, particularly in Southern European countries (Kley, 2021) , lead to shifts in the social care responsibilities towards families, intensifying prevailing familistic social norms and potentially leading to additional stress and further mental health burdens (Bambra, 2019; Curtis et al., 2021) . These developments might have reinforced existing health inequalities related to unemployment protection across European welfare regimes of varying generosity, with Northern and Central-Western European countries showing more protective welfare support than Southern European countries (Bambra and Eikemo, 2009; Vahid Shahidi, Siddiqi and Muntaner, 2016) . Nevertheless, the role of (de)familism in a comparative perspective has been neglected, particularly in the context of the intergenerational family (Gumà-Lao and Baranowska-Rataj, 2023), and most of the present research focuses on single-country contexts (Greenfield and Marks, 2006; Milkie, Bierman and Schieman, 2008; Albertini and Piccitto, 2023) in the study of children's unemployment and their parents' mental health.

To consider the role of (de)familism regimes in the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health (Research Question 3), we explore differentials across four groups of Northern European, Central-Western European, Southern European and Central-Eastern European countries (Figure 1 ) with varying degrees of (de)familism (Leitner, 2003; Saraceno and Keck, 2010) . We hypothesize a more substantial and negative association in more familistic countries, i.e. Southern and Central-Eastern European countries, due to the additional burden of increased material support demands.

Methods

Data and sample

We used data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). SHARE is a crossnational longitudinal panel survey containing recurring information on health, social, economic and environmental living conditions for more than 140,000 individuals aged 50 and older from 28 European countries and Israel (Börsch-Supan et al., 2013) . SHARE's unique household panel structure allowed us to link rich information on the parents (i.e. the primary SHARE respondents) with basic socio-demographic information on up to four of their children from 2004 to 2015 (i.e. waves 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6). We linked the parent and child observations over the included waves using unique identifier variables for the household survey respondents (parents) and their children provided by SHARE. We conducted all main analyses for each parent-child dyad separately.

In our analysis sample, we included respondents from all European countries participating in SHARE before the Great Recession in 2008, i.e. from wave 1 (2004-05) or 2 (2006-07), except Greece pausing its participation in waves 4 (2011) and 5 (2013), resulting in a considerably long observational gap. Because of panel attrition over the SHARE study period (Table S4 ), the study period ended after wave 6 (2015). We could not consider wave 3 ('SHARELIFE '; 2008-09) because it provides solely retrospective life history information on the respondents (Börsch-Supan et al., 2013) . Our final sampling included 12 European countries (Figure 1 ). We restricted our sample to respondents who were parents with at least one working-age child, i.e. 18 to 64 and were at risk of unemployment. As the unemployment information existed in the first two waves only for up to four children per household, we only observed these initially reported four children for each parental household. We obtained a final sample of 14,954 parents and their 26,382 children (clustered in 31,571 parent-child dyads) with 92,667 observations from SHARE wave 1 (2004-05) to 6 (2015) (sampling procedure in Figure S1 ). Table 1 provides a sample description.

Measures

Dependent variable: parents' mental health

Our dependent variable of parents' mental health relied on respondent-reported information on depressive symptoms from the Euro-D scale (Prince et al., 1999; Castro-Costa et al., 2008) . The Euro-D scale is a survey instrument indicating the presence and accumulation of 12 depressive symptoms, namely depressed mood, pessimism, suicidal thoughts, guilt feelings, sleeping problems, deprived interest, irritability, decreased appetite, fatigue, concentration problems, declining enjoyment, and tearfulness (Mehrbrodt, Gruber and Wagner, 2021) . Thus, the Euro-D score can range from 0 (no depressive symptoms) to 12 (all listed depressive symptoms). The corresponding clinically validated risk of suffering pathological depression exhibited four or more symptoms (Guerra et al., 2015) . Therefore, we operationalized parents' mental health as a timevarying binary variable of increased depression risk with four or more Euro-D symptoms (Aretz, 2022) and three or fewer symptoms as reference. We also provide all main analyses with the Euro-D score as the outcome variable in the supplementary materials (Tables S10 ).

Main explanatory variable: children's unemployment

We obtained our main explanatory variable of children's unemployment from the SHARE child module. The module includes socio-demographic and parent-child relationship information for each wave (except wave 3) and each child of the SHARE respondents separately, provided by the main household respondent, i.e. one of the parents. We determined children's unemployment status based on a variable on each child's employment status, formulated as the question 'What is [child name]'s employment status?' with answer options of 'Refusal', 'Don't know', 'Fulltime employed', 'Part-time employed', 'Self-employed or working for family business', 'Unemployed', 'In vocational (re)training/education', 'Parental leave', 'In retirement or early retirement', 'Permanently sick or disabled', 'Looking after home or family', 'In mandatory military service', and 'Other'. We operationalized each child's unemployment as a time-varying binary variable of being 'Unemployed' with 'Not unemployed' as the reference category, combining all remaining answer options except 'Refusal' and 'Permanently sick or disabled' to prevent the misclassification of these individuals.

Moderation assessment of the Great Recession

We assessed the role of the present economic conditions in the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health using temporal information on the Great Recession for the selected European countries. Specifically, we created a timevarying categorical variable that corresponded with each country's progression of the Great Recession, categorizing each SHARE wave in the pre-Great Recession, Great Recession (as reference category), or ADULT CHILDREN'S UNEMPLOYMENT AND PARENTS' MENTAL HEALTH post-Great Recession phase (Aretz, 2022) . We defined the pre-Great Recession phase similarly for all included countries as the waves prior to the start of the Great Recession in 2008 (waves 1 (2004-05) and 2 (2006-07)). We assumed that the sudden onset of the Great Recession acted as an 'initial shock' and therefore started assessing the Great Recession and post-Great Recession phases from wave 4 (2011). We could not consider wave 3 (2008-09) for our analysis due to omitted time-current information in this wave.

We categorized each country individually in the Great Recession and post-Great Recession phases based on, first, their GDP per capita growth (OECD, 2025) and, second, their annual national unemployment rates (World Bank, 2025) . Specifically, countries classified for the Great Recession phase with two consecutive quarters of negative GDP per capita growth (selecting the first quarter year of 2004 as a reference for stable economic conditions) or continuously higher national unemployment rates compared to pre-Great Recession levels (country-individual assessments Figure S2 ) and transitioned to the post-Great Recession phase if they no longer complied with these conditions. Table 2 shows each included country's classification into the Great Recession phases over SHARE waves 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6. We assessed the robustness of our approach by conducting sensitivity analyses controlling directly for national unemployment rates.

Stratification and control variable of country groups

We considered the prevailing (de)familism regimes in the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health by clustering the selected countries of Northern, Central-Western, Southern and Central-Eastern European countries (Figure 1 ). This Co-residing with parents (%) 6.1 15.5 0.4 0.9

Contact (1 (never)-7 (daily)) 4.9 5.0 4.8 4.9

geographically driven grouping reflects contemporary welfare typologies (Ferrera and Rhodes, 2000; Sapir, 2006) and European family support cultures (Leitner, 2003; Saraceno and Keck, 2010) . We utilized the country grouping in the general analysis as a time-constant categorical control variable, with Northern European countries as the reference category, and stratified accordingly in the country-group-specific analysis.

Control variables

We included several socio-demographic and parentchild relationship control variables: (1) time-constant continuous variables on parents' and children's age at baseline to account for age effects in parents' perception of the severity of potential unemployment (Fingerman et al., 2009) and stress-responsiveness (Majnarić et al., 2021) ; (2) a time-constant binary variable on children's gender with sons as reference to control for gendered role expectations towards children (Altweck et al., 2021) and coping with unemployment (Knabe, Schöb and Weimann, 2016) ; (3) a time-varying categorical variable on the presence of dependent grandchildren of ages of 0-2, 3-6, 7-11, 12-16, or older with no grandchildren as reference to consider the children's family responsibilities (Chzhen, 2016) ; (4) a time-varying binary variable on parent-child co-residence with not co-resident as reference to adjust for subsequent confounding (Tosi and Grundy, 2018); (5) a time-varying categorical variable on the contact frequency between parents and their children with seven ordered categories from no contact as reference to daily contact plus unknown contact frequency (approx. 1 per cent, see Table S5 ) to proxy relationship quality (Lück and Castrén, 2018) and practised support (Akaeda, 2018) ; (6) a time-varying binary variable on financial transfers from the parents to the child of more than €250 in the preceding year with no transfers or no information as reference (Table S5 ) to control for financial burdens for the parents (Fingerman et al., 2015) ; (7) a time-varying scale variable on parents' general health in categories ranging from poor health to excellent health; and (8) a time-varying variable on the number of child observations per parent to account for the accumulated exposure to child unemployment.

Statistical analysis

We applied linear probability regression analysis (Dollmann, 2021) to examine the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health, both overall and before, during and after the Great Recession. We estimated both pooled linear probability models and fixed-effects linear probability models controlling for child-parent-level confounding.

By combining these two complementary methods, we efficiently utilized the longitudinal data structure, providing insights into the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health at each ADULT CHILDREN'S UNEMPLOYMENT AND PARENTS' MENTAL HEALTH observation time point and changes in parents' mental health over their children's unemployment trajectories. We first specified the pooled linear probability models with increased depression risk as the dependent variable, and the child's unemployment status, the Great Recession phase, the country group (both interacted with the child's unemployment status), the child's and parent's age at baseline, the child's gender, the presence of grandchildren, the parent-child co-residence status, their contact frequency, parents' financial transfers to the child, the parent's health status and the number of child observations as the independent variables. We additionally included a continuous SHARE wave indicator accounting for time effects and clustered the standard errors for children to correct for the potential error term correlation within individuals over time. The pooled linear probability models allowed us to estimate the average effect of children's unemployment on their parents' mental health over time while accounting for clustered observations within individuals. We then specified the fixed-effects linear probability models at the parent-child dyad level, i.e. for each parent-child combination. We used a similar model specification as the pooled model, excluding the time-constant variables of the country group, the child's and parent's ages at baseline, and the child's gender as their effects were absorbed by the model constant. The fixed-effects linear probability model enables us to estimate withinparent changes in mental health over time, assessing the role of their children's unemployment while effectively controlling for all time-invariant parent and child characteristics, both observed and unobserved, thereby reducing potential omitted variable bias.

Our approach allowed for a comprehensive assessment of both between-individual and within-individual variation in parents' mental health responses to their children's unemployment. It assessed the role of unobserved heterogeneity across parents and their children and the robustness of our findings across different model specifications. While the pooled linear probability model in the first step does not fully account for such unobserved heterogeneity that may confound the studied association and thus does not allow for solid causal inferences, the fixed-effects linear probability model in the second step approaches this issue by effectively eliminating the influence of stable confounders on the estimates.

We conducted all analyses separately for fathers and mothers to consider gendered differences in the socio-emotional relationship between parents and their adult children (Kahn, McGill and Bianchi, 2011) and support provision clustered in role expectations (Fingerman et al., 2009) , potentially leading to different mental health responses (Tables S6 ). We assessed the goodness of fit for all models by comparing the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) (Table S7 ). We presented the results as average marginal effects (AME) estimated from the regression models (Tables S8 ). We performed several additional analyses to address some issues related to unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity in our study design (overview in Table S9 ): first, we provided all regression results with the continuous Euro-D score as independent variable ranging from 0 to 12; second, we analysed asymmetric effects (Allison, 2019 ) of children's unemployment to investigate differences in parents' mental health responses for children's transition into and out of unemployment, including two separate independent variables of children's unemployment and no unemployment in the same regression equation and testing the estimates against one another; third, we presented the results stratified by children's age and gender to consider potential differences between the effects of son's and daughter's unemployment and by children's age (Gumà-Lao and Baranowska-Rataj, 2023); and fourth, we performed a subsample analysis including a time-constant scale variable of children's highest educational attainment at baseline standardized within each country ranging from low to high educational level to analyse the role of the socioeconomic status for parents' normative perception of their children's unemployment and children's coping resources (Schuring et al., 2013) , responding to the large number of missing values in the children's educational attainment variable (approx. 52.3 per cent, see Table S5 ). We also assessed the robustness of our methodological approach through several sensitivity analyses.

All analyses were carried out in Stata 18 SE.

Results

Descriptive results

Table 3 presents the prevalences of child unemployment and depression risks and the mean difference tests for mothers and fathers over the Great Recession phases for the pooled sample and by country groups. We observed a total of 4,289 (4.6 per cent) child unemployment events. Fathers indicated 15.9 per cent of increased depression risk, and mothers 31.5 per cent. The mean difference in depression risk prevalence was larger and more significant overall and in most country groups in mothers with child unemployment compared to those without than in fathers.

Regression results

We reported all main results as the average marginal effects estimated from the final pooled and fixed-effects linear probability regression models presented in Table 4 (condensed) and Tables S6 in the supplementary materials.

We first analysed the overall association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health (RQ1) by investigating parents' depression risks (Figure 2 ). Fathers experiencing child unemployment showed 1.9 per cent points higher depression risk in the pooled model and 0.2 points lower risk in the fixed-effects model than those who did not, yet both estimates were not significantly different from zero (p > 0.05). Mothers showed significantly increased depression risks with children's unemployment in both models, with 6.5 per cent points (p < 0.001) and 2.7 points higher depression risk (p < 0.01).

We then investigated whether the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health varies across the Great Recession phases (RQ2) (Figure 2 ). Fathers' overall depression risks adopted a slightly reversed u-shape, with 2 per cent points increase in depression risks pre-, 2.8 points during, and 0.7 points decrease post-Great Recession in the pooled model, and 2.2 points decrease in depression risks pre-, 2.6 points increase during, and 0.5 points decrease post-Great Recession in the fixed-effects model. None of the effects were significantly different from zero at the 95 per cent confidence level (Wald test: p = 0.6075 (pooled model), p = 0.1720 (fixedeffects model)). Mothers' depression risk assumed a slight reverse u-shape in the pooled model specification, with a 6.8 per cent points increase in depression risks pre-(p < 0.001), 7.1 points during (p < 0.001) and 4.6 points post-Great Recession (p < 0.05). While the estimates were significantly different from zero at a 95 per cent confidence level, they were not significantly different from one another (Wald test: p = 0.6450). In the fixed-effects models, mothers' depression risk decreased over time from 4.8 per cent points pre-(p < 0.01), 3.2 points during (p < 0.05) to -2.1 points post-Great Recession, were pre-and during the Great Recession significantly different from zero at a 95 per cent confidence level and significantly different from one another (Wald test: p = 0.0403), indicating a moderating effect of the Great Recession with increased depression risks of children's unemployment in mothers during than post-Great Recession.

We finally examined the differentials in the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health, overall and at different economic conditions, across (de)familism regimes in Europe (RQ3) (Figure 3 ). Fathers showed overall increased depression risks of 1.8 per cent points in the pooled and 1.2 points in the fixed-effects model with children's unemployment in Northern European countries (Figure 3 Mean difference in depression risk in percentage points between parents without and with child unemployment Pooled -6.5*** -4.5** -6.2*** -6.5* -14.2*** -13.4*** -14.9*** -13.1*** Country group Northern -2.1 -6.1* 0.2 1.7 -7.5*** -6.3 -7.0* -10.1* Central-Western -3.3* -1.0 -5.7* -5.8 -8.8*** -12.7*** -6.9** -4.1 Southern -2.1 0.2 -2.4 [no values] -8.3*** -16.3*** -1.8 [no values] Table 4 Condensed Regression Table of Pooled and Fixed-Effects Linear Probability Models for Fathers and Mothers

Effect on depression risk in percentage points Pooled Linear Probability Models Fixed-Effects Linear Probability Models Null models Final model Null models Final model M0.a M0.b M0.a M0.b Fathers (N = 38,093) Child unemployment (reference: not unemployed) Unemployed 5.5 *** 6.1 *** 3.1 0.0 1.7 1.6

Great Recession (GR) phases (reference: GR)

Pre-GR -1.3 0.0 0.0 -1.5 Post-GR 1.4 * 2.7 *** -0.1 0.1 Child unemployment X Great Recession (GR) Unemployed X Pre-GR -1.6 -0.7 -3.5 -3.8 Unemployed X Post-GR 0.5 -3.4 -1.9 -2

.1 Constant (%) 11.8 *** 13.8 *** 51.4 *** 14.3 ** 14.6 ** 40.0 *** Mothers (N = 54,574) Child unemployment (reference: not unemployed) Unemployed 14.1 *** 14.7 *** 3.9 3.3 ** 3.4 * 3.1 * Great Recession (GR) phases (reference: GR

) Pre-GR 0.9 -2.1 0.4 -3.4 ** Post-GR -1.9 ** 1.6 -1.8 ** -1.5 * Child unemployment X Great Recession (GR) Unemployed X Pre-GR -1.4 -0.3 1.8 1.6

Unemployed X Post-GR -1.5 -2.5 -5.6 * -5.2 * Constant (%) 31.2 *** 29.5 *** 79.2 *** 33.4 *** 32.9 *** 65.2 *** Included control variables:

SHARE wave 1 X X X X X X Child observations per wave 2 X X X X X X Country group 3 X Parent socio-demographic controls 4 X Child socio-demographic controls 5 X X 5a

Parent-child relationship controls 6 X X

Source: Data obtained from SHARE (Börsch-Supan et al., 2013), own estimations. Note: Condensed regression table of pooled and fixed-effects linear probability regression models for fathers and mothers reported in percentage points for the pooled sample (fathers: N = 38,093; mothers: N = 54,574). Significance levels: *** p < 0.001, ** p < 0.01, * p < 0.05. See Tables S6 in the supplementary materials for the full regression tables. Annotations for included control variables: 1 SHARE wave = continuous variable controlling for the SHARE wave; 2 Child observations per wave = continuous variable controlling for the number of children included per parent per wave in regression models; 3 Country group = categorical variable controlling for the respective country group of Northern, Central-Western, Southern or Central-Eastern European countries (overview in Figure 1 ); 4 Parent socio-demographic controls = parents' age at baseline and a categorical variable on their self-rated health; 5 Child socio-demographic controls = child's age at baseline and gender and the presence of grandchildren; 5a Child sociodemographic controls in the fixed-effects model specification only include the presence of dependent grandchildren as the time-constant controls are absorbed by the constant in this modelling approach; 6 Parent-child relationship controls = parent-child co-residence status, contact frequency and financial transfers from the parent to the child. Note: Average marginal effects of children's unemployment on their parents' depression risk for the overall observation period (left) and over the Great Recession phases (right) estimated for fathers and mothers from pooled and fixed-effects linear regression models (Tables S6 ). All estimates are provided in Table S8 .

Additional analyses

The additional analyses of asymmetric effects revealed no significant difference in the effects of a child's transition into and out of unemployment on parents' depression risks (Wald test: p > 0.05) (Figure S11 and Table S12 ). Further, the heterogeneity analyses of children's age and gender (Figure S13 ) indicated no significant differences in the overall results between sons and daughters of different ages. We further performed several sensitivity analyses (overview in Table S9 ): we included children's educational level in the analysis S8 .

(Figure S14 ), controlled for children's prior employment status (Tables S15 and Figure S16 ) and the lagged contact frequency between parents and children (Tables S15 ), analysed combined children's unemployment per parent (Tables S15 and Figure S17 ), restricted the sample to observations without missing values in the control variables, with a reference category of only formal employment for unemployment and with only good parental mental health at baseline (Tables S15 ), and controlled for countries' annual unemployment rates (Tables S15 and Figure S18 ). Our sample and model modifications did not significantly affect the conclusions drawn from our results, demonstrating the robustness of our analytical approach and results.

Discussion

The association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health has not been fully understood, particularly considering contextual forces such as the present economic conditions or prevailing support cultures. Our study contributes to the literature by adopting a comparative approach and investigating this association before, during and after the Great Recession across European (de)familism regimes. In doing so, we utilize unique SHARE data, including information on intergenerational family members between 2004 and 2015 and from 12 European countries. Our findings revealed that children's unemployment was overall associated with declined parental mental health, with mothers showing significant mental health responses also when controlling for individual-level confounding. Variations in mothers' mental health before, during and after the Great Recession suggested a moderating effect of the economic context. Results showed considerable variation across European regions, with mothers experiencing overall significant mental health declines in Central-Western, Southern, and Central-Eastern Europe with their children's unemployment. The moderating effect of the economic context was, however, only present for mothers in Southern European countries and for Central-Eastern European countries for the pooled estimates only with stronger effects in the pre-Great Recession period, indicating worse mental health responses during compared to before the Great Recession.

Our overall findings advance the comprehension of the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health (Greenfield and Marks, 2006; Milkie, Bierman and Schieman, 2008; Albertini and Piccitto, 2023; Baranowska-Rataj, Högberg and Bernardi, 2024) . The experience of children's unemployment itself thereby appeared to be of greater importance for mothers' mental health than, for example, children's trajectory into unemployment (Albertini and Piccitto, 2023) or their socioeconomically-driven prospects (Torres et al., 2021) . This finding supported the normative explanation of parents' mental health responses to their children's unemployment, potentially perceived as a violation of prevailing adult life course expectations (Suitor and Pillemer, 2006) . At the same time, material and financial support towards unemployed children potentially exacerbated the emotional strain of parents who experienced the practised support of their children in need (Fingerman et al., 2009) as a burden. Accordingly, the overall negative association between children's unemployment and mothers' mental health was imminent in all except the rather de-familistic Northern European countries.

The economic context moderated the effect of children's unemployment on their mothers' mental health (Albertini and Piccitto, 2023) , particularly in the more familistic Southern or Central-Eastern European countries with potentially stronger family support norms in times of adversity (Akaeda, 2018) . Mothers' positive mental health responses before the Great Recession might result from increased support from children without employment obligations, while the responses turned negative during the severe Great Recession. While we acknowledge the notably more severe consequences of the Great Recession in Southern European countries (Figari, Salvatori and Sutherland, 2011) , the severity of the recession did not alone explain the regional differences in parents' mental health responses (see Figure S18 ). Other cultural differences included in our country grouping approach, such as reporting norms of mental health symptoms, welfare generosity protecting unemployed individuals from adverse mental health effects (Vahid Shahidi, Siddiqi and Muntaner, 2016) , or different gender role expressions might also reflect in our mental health observations of the parents and potentially contribute to the geographical clustering of our results.

The latter is clearly reflected in our results and consistent with the few existing studies (Albertini and Piccitto, 2023; Gumà-Lao and Baranowska-Rataj, 2023) , showing declined mental health in mothers experiencing children's unemployment. These gendered mental health responses might be due to differences in stress processing and coping between mothers and fathers leading to internalized distress and more tremendous mental health consequences in mothers (Chaplin et al., 2008) or traditionally stronger emotional involvement of mothers with their children (Fingerman et al., 2009; Kahn, McGill and Bianchi, 2011) resulting in mothers' increased suffering from their children's adverse life events (Uccheddu and Van Gaalen, 2022) . These results were particularly evident in the more familistic Southern and Central-Eastern European countries, particularly the latter explanation, emphasizing the cultural anchoring of the transmission of distress within the intergenerational family and the imminent role of family interlinkages over the entire life course (Carr, 2018) . However, fathers' positive mental health responses to children's unemployment in Central-Western countries before the Great Recession constitute a central puzzle in the present analysis, particularly as the estimate already accounts for individual-level confounding. On a speculative note, fathers' own experience with occasional sequences of unemployment during their working life (Ek et al., 2021) might lead to fathers' improved acceptance and increased emotional support towards their children's situation, at least under economically stable conditions with favourable re-employment prospects and within secure welfare arrangements. We cannot fully explain these results using our data and study scope, which emphasizes the need for further research on parents' experiences of their children's adverse labour market trajectories, potentially using more extensive data sources.

We consequently assessed the limitations of our study's methodology and selected data. First, the information on children mainly provides general socioeconomic and parent-child relationship characteristics. Information on the children's perception of their unemployment, resulting income loss or emotional strain, and early-life conditions potentially indicating selection into unemployment is not available. Therefore, we were restrained to a more general analysis of the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health, disregarding specific mechanisms. Second, parents as the respective SHARE respondents provided the information on their children, risking reporting bias due to parents' unawareness of their children's actual employment status. We therefore acknowledge the potential underestimation of children's unemployment prevalences, suggesting even more pronounced mental health effects in parents experiencing children's unemployment. Third, the information on children's employment status is only available for each SHARE wave, complicating nuanced analyses of the length of children's unemployment or accumulation. We addressed this issue by conducting an additional analysis of children's prior employment statuses (see Figure S16 ) that emphasized the importance of the mere experience of children's unemployment for parents, yet warranting a cautious interpretation given the observation gaps of children's unemployment in SHARE. Fourth, the solely retrospective information available in wave 3 ('SHARELIFE') meant a considerable observation gap right at the initial shock of the Great Recession in 2008 to 2009. We therefore could observe the Great Recession only from 2011 (wave 4) onwards, when many Central-Western and Northern countries had already started to recover from the initial recession. The loss of the observational insights at this crucial moment of the Great Recession potentially led to an underestimation of the influence of adverse economic conditions in the association between children's unemployment and their parents' mental health.

Our approach of presenting both pooled and fixedeffects linear probability regression enabled us to analyse the overall association and parental mental health responses to their children's unemployment. The model specifications are distinct in their potential to consider unobserved heterogeneity. The pooled model estimates associations and neglects the potential influence of unobserved confounders in explaining the studied association. Particularly given the scarce information on children provided in SHARE, results from the pooled model bear the risk of omitted variable biases and misinterpreting the influence of children's unemployment on their parents' mental health. The fixed-effects model at the parent-child dyad level in our study provided a remedy by allowing for correlation between unobserved time-invariant factors, for example, children's or parents' character traits, their general labour market position or parents' mental health predisposition, and the variables of interest, thus providing a more robust basis for causal inference. Nevertheless, we remain cautious in causality claims of our obtained results due to the data-structural limitations mentioned above and the inability of the models to account for unobserved time-varying confounders, reverse causality or endogeneity.

Despite these acknowledged limitations, our study provides novel and robust evidence for intergenerational mental health effects of family economic stress, particularly in familistic contexts and under unfavourable economic conditions. In light of the ageing of the population across Western countries and the significant increase in the disease burden of mental health (Grundy and Murphy, 2017) , our findings contribute to understanding the factors that drive the mental health of the older population. Furthermore, by employing the family life course perspective, our study places children's unemployment among the important intergenerational life events for studying older adults' mental health and well-being. We recommend future research to focus on the underlying mechanism facilitating parental mental health effects of children's unemployment. Our results thus indicate that adverse economic contexts matter for those affected and their ageing parents. Hence, policymakers should adopt a holistic and intergenerationally orientated view of unemployment and economic crises to protect overall population health.

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