Older adults often receive support from their adult children, which may include occasional help with household chores to intensive caregiving activities. For the availability of such support, parents and children should be in close geographic proximity. Changes in the mental health of older adults may prompt family members to move closer together or cohabit to ensure they receive the necessary support. Conversely, the mental health of older adults can also be influenced by these changes in proximity. Previous studies have only examined the reciprocal relationship between geographic proximity and mental health unidirectional, which may have led to biased results.

A recent study by ISS researchers Lisa Jessee and Karsten Hank with Valeria Bordone from the University of Vienna addresses these bidirectional mechanisms. They use longitudinal data from the American Health and Retirement Study to investigate whether changes in geographic proximity between children and their older parents affect the mental health of the parents and/or whether changes in the parents' mental health affect changes in geographic proximity.

The study shows that it is primarily changes in geographic proximity that affect the mental health of the parents, and not vice versa. In particular, the researchers find that moving in with children can negatively impact the mental health of the parents. When examining differences along gender and race/ethnicity more closely, it becomes evident that especially men and "white" Americans may suffer from moving in with their children.

The results largely confirm previous research and provide a more nuanced picture of who is actually affected by cohabitation. They highlight that more – or in this case, closer – is not always ’merrier’.