A Study in Family Health: (2) a Comparison of the Health of Fathers, Mothers and Children

Abstract

This paper deals with information obtained from nearly five hundred families in which at least one parent was living with one or more children aged 15 or under. It examines the association between the health of fathers and mothers, and also between that of parents and children. Elsewhere (Hare and Shaw, 1965a) we showed that, in the sample population from which these families came, there was a strong tendency for persons with poor mental health to have poor physical health as well.∗ We took this to support the view that in any population there tends to be a group of persons, comprising some 10 to 15 per cent, of the whole, who are particularly prone to ill-health of all kinds and who make a correspondingly high call on the facilities of the health service. One of the objects of the present study was to try and determine if there were families, as well as persons, prone to ill-health—in other words, whether a high rate of ill-health in (say) fathers was associated with high rates in other members of the family.