Education achievement stress ‘as bad as divorce’

A failure to live up to parents’ educational achievements can be as distressing to men as getting divorced, according to a study.

It suggested that men who achieve lower levels of qualifications than their mothers and fathers are more likely to experience “psychological distress”, such as feeling depressed, lonely or unhappy.

The study, by academics at Oxford University, is based on analysis of data on more than 50,000 people in the UK, as well as individuals in 27 other European countries.

Researchers divided parents and their children’s educational attainment into three categories. In Britain the top level was equivalent to a degree, middle level to A-levels and bottom level to GCSE or lower.

This information was compared to an overall score on a psychological distress index, based on questions to each individual about their feelings during the previous week, such as feeling depressed.

The findings showed that men whose educational achievement was at the bottom who had parents with educational achievements at the top level were more than twice as likely to be in the top 10 per cent most psychologically distressed compared with those who had a level of educational achievement that matched that of their parents.