The income gradient of child mental health in Australia? Does it vary across assessors, SES and family characteristics?

The income gradient of child mental health in Australia? Does it vary across assessors, SES and family characteristics?

Understanding the factors that enhance or limit children’s physical and mental health is a topic of increasing interest to researchers and policymakers alike, as child health is known to have short-term effects on academic attainment and long-term effects on adolescent and adult health and labour market outcomes. Income is one important precursor of child physical and general health, but studies examining income gradients in child mental health remain scarce. To our knowledge, only Johnston et al. (2014) have examined these relationships using British data. Their findings indicate that income has a positive effect on child’s mental health, but the magnitude of such an effect varies depending on who assesses child’s mental health (the child, the mother or a teacher). In this paper, we shed further light on these issues using longitudinal data from a large, national cohort of Australian children. We contribute to the literature by: (i) adding further covariates and applying panel approaches to control for unobserved heterogeneity that might be correlated with both income and child mental health, and (ii) examining the evolution of the income gradient in child mental health by child’s age. We find that, when only a basic set of covariates is present, family income has a significant positive effect on the mental health of Australian children. This effect varies depending on who assesses child’s mental health (it is largest when assessed by parents, and smallest when assessed by the child), and it fades in the presence of controls for parental health or unobserved effects via a fixed-effects estimator.

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