The Impact of Household Debt on Children's Depressive Symptoms: Evidence from China.

Xiaoli Huang, Tingyu Li, Liqiong Lin, Christopher Gan

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Article in Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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1 · What the graph read from it

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

Xiaoli HuangCollege of Economics and Management, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China.

Tingyu LiCollege of Economics and Management, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China.

Liqiong LinCollege of Economics and Management, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China.

Christopher GanDepartment of Financial and Business System, Lincoln University, Christchurch 7647, New Zealand.ORCID 0000-0002-5618-1651

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

The sustained accumulation of household debt may pose significant challenges to children's mental health in China, particularly their depressive symptoms. However, limited research has examined this relationship. Using data from the 2020 and 2022 waves of the China Family Panel Studies, covering 805 respondents, we employed a pooled ordinary least squares (POLS) regression model to investigate the impact of household debt on children's depressive symptoms. Our results show that higher household debt is associated with an increase in children's depressive symptoms, primarily driven by housing debt and nonbank-sourced debt. These associations appear to operate through reduced parent-child intimacy and increased parent-child conflict. Notably, the adverse impacts are mitigated when fathers work longer hours to repay debt and when marital satisfaction is higher. Overall, our findings highlight important implications for enhancing child welfare and promoting family financial stability.

Indexed as

children’s depressive symptomshousehold debtmarital satisfactionparent–child conflictparent–child intimacyworking hours

Identifiers

PMID41301334

DOI10.3390/bs15111530

PMCPMC12649557

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.