In low-income countries, intergenerational processes can culminate in the replication of extreme forms of health disadvantage between mothers and adult daughters, including experiencing a young child’s death. The preventable nature of most child deaths raises questions of whether social resources can protect women from enduring this adversity like their mothers. This study examined whether education—widely touted as a vehicle for social mobility in resource-poor countries—disrupts the intergenerational cycle of maternal bereavement. We estimated multilevel discrete-time survival models of women’s hazard of child loss using Demographic and Health Survey Program data (N = 195,744 women in 345 subnational regions in 32 African countries). Women’s educational attainment minimizes the salience of their mothers’ bereavement history for their own probability of child loss; however, mothers’ background becomes irrelevant only among women with ≥10 years of schooling. Education’s neutralizing influence is most prominent in the highest mortality-burdened communities.

中文翻译：

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健康劣势的代际传递：教育能否扰乱它？

在低收入国家，代际过程最终可能导致母亲和成年女儿之间出现极端形式的健康劣势，包括幼儿死亡。大多数儿童死亡是可以预防的，这引发了这样的问题：社会资源是否可以保护妇女免于像她们的母亲一样忍受这种逆境。这项研究调查了教育——在资源匮乏国家被广泛吹捧为社会流动的工具——是否会扰乱产妇丧亲之痛的代际循环。我们使用人口和健康调查计划数据（N = 32 个非洲国家 345 个次国家区域的 195,744 名妇女）估计了妇女失去子女风险的多层次离散时间生存模型。女性的受教育程度降低了她们母亲的丧亲经历对她们失去孩子的可能性的重要性；然而，只有受教育年限≥10年的女性，母亲的背景才变得无关紧要。教育的中和影响在死亡率最高的社区中最为突出。