Student Spotlight, Whitney Wells: Supporting Parent Health

We often think of family support policies and early childhood education as investments in children. My PhD research suggests they’re also important for parents’ health. I recently completed my PhD dissertation, which examined how parenthood, sociodemographic factors, and family support policies shape parent health. Here are the questions that motivated my research, and what we learned:

How does raising young children shape parents’ cardiovascular health? Who is at greatest risk?

To prevent cardiovascular disease, the American Heart Association emphasizes the importance of maintaining cardiovascular health through health behaviors such as getting enough sleep, staying physically active, eating a healthy diet, and avoiding smoking. But the demands of raising young children can make it difficult for parents to prioritize these behaviors and their own health.

We looked at the relationships between parenthood and cardiovascular risk factors using national survey data from over 250,000 US adults. We found that being a parent of a child under five had both adverse associations (like getting less sleep and physical activity) but also beneficial associations (like lower substance use and psychological distress). The patterns varied: associations were most pronounced among mothers facing greater caregiving demands and most adverse among mothers with fewer resources.

How can we better support families during this period?

To look at how to support parents right at the start of kids’ lives, we examined how state-level paid family leave policies shaped perinatal and postpartum health. We used differences-in-differences analysis in data from over 700,000 births. We found that paid family leave was associated with decreased maternal depression, increased breastfeeding duration, and potentially with increased postpartum checkup attendance among lower-income mothers.

To look at how to support parents with preschool-aged children, we examined the relationship between state-level free preschool programs and parents’ sleep, physical activity, and psychological distress. We used preschool policy data and national survey data for over 14,000 parents of preschool-aged children. We found that more generous state-funded free preschool programs were associated with parents getting more physical activity and, among structurally marginalized mothers, with lower psychological distress.

Overall, our findings suggest that paid family leave and preschool-access programs may support parent health and well-being, especially for mothers facing greater structural barriers.

Why this matters

• Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the US, making it especially important to identify interventions that can improve cardiovascular health for large populations
• Parents of young children often face major time, financial, and caregiving demands, creating barriers for maintaining their own cardiovascular health
• Research on early childhood policies has generally focused on benefits for children, but our research shows these same policies are also important for parents’ health
• Family support policies may represent an opportunity to improve health for multiple generations at once

What’s next?

As I begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, I’ll continue to examine how family support policies shape parent and family health across the life course. Building on this work I’m especially excited to explore questions such as

• How do experiences during early parenthood shape long-term health and well-being?
• How can we disentangle the pathways for how family support policies and programs influence parent and family health?
• How do multiple policies and interventions work together to improve health and promote equity?

If you’re working on related questions or see opportunities to connect and collaborate, I would love to hear from you.

Whitney’s dissertation research was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the NIH.