The Role of Parental education and Intermediary Determinants on Children's Health in Iran

The study using national data, assessed relationship between Parent’s educations with child’s Health in Iran and looking for the role of intermediary variables.
In this Ecological study, we collected national data on parental education as predictive variables, Children’s health as response variable and housing condition, Child’s benefit from health services and Mother’s health as intermediary variables in 31 provinces and did exploratory factor analysis in order to detect latent variables. Then we estimated correlation between latent variables and made structural equation models by residual variables.
Findings: Findings showed that both Structural models which consists mother’s ill-health and bad dwelling situation has good fitness. In structural models, 20 to 80 percent of child health variance has explained by low parental education and bad dwelling situation, and 60 to 80 percent of child health variance has explained by low parental education and bad mother’s ill-health. GFI was between 0.74-0.99 in models.
The findings confirm the role of Socio-economic factors of families, especially mother’s literacy and health and housing condition on children’s health, and show the importance of investment on these factors in order to achieve improvement in children’s health.