The context: Educational expansion across Europe

(February 2026) Since the mid-twentieth century, many European countries pushed for more education for their citizens. The result has been generations of people who’ve spent considerably longer in school and university than their parents ever did. These individuals are known as ‘upwardly mobile’, and researchers have long studied the long-term impacts of that intergenerational mobility. However, less is known about whether a child’s educational success might also have implications for their parents’ wellbeing.

The answer isn’t obvious. Upward mobility is usually framed as a straightforward success story, but research has repeatedly complicated that picture. Moving into a different social world from the one you grew up in can open up cultural and political divides between children and their parents, creating distance and sometimes resentment on both sides. Other studies have found though that upwardly mobile individuals do carry on close family relationships.

Using SHARE data to probe parental experiences of their children’s educational mobility

Although educational mobility occurs within a family context, research on the parents’ wellbeing has been scarce. For this reason, researchers Alina Schmitz and Rasmus Hoffman analysed responses from 80,000 respondents with children and aged 50+ across waves 6, 8, and 9 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to ask whether parents whose children surpassed their educational level report higher life satisfaction than parents with nonmobile or downwardly mobile children. This enormous dataset covers 27 countries across Europe. More than half (54%) of parents had at least one child who achieved higher educational levels than they did.

A dose-response relationship between life satisfaction and number of higher-educated children

The survey asks participants one simple question that is used widely in quality-of-life research and provides a reliable snapshot of overall wellbeing: “On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means completely dissatisfied and 10 means completely satisfied, how satisfied are you with your life?”.

To isolate the effect of children's education, the researchers carefully controlled for a wide range of factors that might otherwise muddy the picture: the parents' own age, gender, health, income, whether they owned their home, their country of residence, and more.

Parents with upwardly mobile children consistently reported higher life satisfaction scores than those whose children had reached the same educational level as them, or lower. And the effect compounded: each additional highly educated child was associated with a further boost. This kind of dose-response pattern — where more exposure leads to a stronger effect — is an important signal that the relationship is likely to be real rather than coincidental.

Low-educated parents benefit most from children’s success

Not all parents benefited equally. Parents with lower education levels reported even more life satisfaction than the middle-educated. Perhaps this makes intuitive sense: when you’ve had less yourself, seeing your child achieve more may carry greater emotional weight.

Using SHARE’s social network module to learn about parent-child relationships and life satisfaction

This is where things get interesting, and a little puzzling. The researchers used SHARE's detailed social network module to test three possible explanations for why upward mobility is linked to better life satisfaction:

1. Emotional closeness between parents and children 3.4 out of 4 on the closeness scale, regardless of children’s attainment – so educational mobility neither damaged or visibly strengthened the relationship.
2. Financial support from children to parents was rare across the entire sample - only 3% of parents received financial transfers of €250 or more from their children in the past year. The rate was no higher among parents with mobile children.
3. Practical help, such as assistance with daily tasks, was received by around 13% of parents, again with no major difference between groups.

None of these measures explained the wellbeing gap. Upwardly mobile children weren’t closer to their parents, weren’t sending more money home, and weren’t more likely to help out. Yet their parents were still happier.

The most compelling explanation the researchers offer is one they couldn't directly measure: pride. Parents might benefit from seeing their children succeed, regardless of what those children can actually provide materially. There's also the comfort of knowing that if things got hard, a more educated, better-resourced child would be there.

It might also be that children who are more educationally mobile have been somewhat influenced by parents’ particularly keen on this.

A note on context: absolute vs relative mobility

Not all upward mobility is equal. A child might be one of few upwardly mobile people in their neighbourhood and cohort. Alternatively, they might be part of a generation that saw massive educational expansion. Whether a child's success is rare or commonplace in their generation likely shapes how much reflected pride and reassurance their parents feel – something future research will need to explore more carefully.

Why it matters

Most research on social mobility focuses on what it does to the people moving up. This study flips that question around. It shows that a parent's wellbeing in older age isn't shaped only by their own resources and history – it’s also shaped by what their children have achieved. That makes children's educational mobility a genuinely new lens through which to understand inequality in later life.

Interested in research on education’s impacts across the life course using SHARE data? CLICK HERE.