Does intergenerational income upward mobility increase the subjective well-being of middle-aged and older people in China?—Evidence from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS)

Intergenerational income mobility is widely regarded as a key indicator of social vitality and opportunity, yet its consequences may extend beyond the mobile individuals themselves. Using 3956 parent–child pairs from the China Family Panel Studies, this study examines whether adult children’s intergenerational income upward mobility (IIUM) is associated with the subjective well-being (SWB) of middle-aged and older parents, and through which forms of intergenerational support such associations operate. Using a structural equation model, we find that IIUM is significantly associated with higher SWB.

This association is partially mediated through two opposing support channels: IIUM is linked to increased financial transfers from children, which enhances parental SWB, but also to reduced emotional support, which modestly offsets these gains. The magnitude of these pathways varies across key social and institutional groups (e.g., employment/retirement status, hukou, and medical insurance coverage). These findings extend research on intergenerational mobility beyond the outcomes of the mobile individuals themselves by showing that adult children’s upward income mobility has measurable spillover effects on parents’ subjective well-being, and by identifying the material–emotional support trade-off through which these effects operate.

Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China Foreign Environmental Cooperation Center, Beijing, China Correspondence to Haoyang Ji or Huaqing Tang. The authors declare no competing interests. This study is a secondary analysis of de-identified data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and involved no new participant recruitment or data collection.

The original CFPS surveys were reviewed and approved by the Peking University Biomedical Institutional Review Board (PU IRB; approval no. IRB00001052-14010), and this approval number remains unchanged across survey waves. All procedures involving human participants were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Further details are available at https://www.isss.pku.edu.cn/cfps/en/faq/PublishwithCFPSData/index.htm. Before each wave of the CFPS, written informed consent was obtained from all respondents. Respondents aged 15 years or older signed the consent form themselves, whereas consent for respondents younger than 15 years was provided by their legal guardians.

The present study analysed only de-identified secondary data and involved no direct contact with participants. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material.