When we think of why someone might retire early, our minds are unlikely to make the leap to their childhood for the answer. But a group of researchers interested in what sorts of things affect our later working lives, believe that early retirement may indeed have some of its roots in our younger years. The research sheds new and important light on worldwide efforts to plug pensions gaps and get more people working longer. Hanno Hoven from the University of Dusseldorf outlines why he and colleagues from the International Centre for Lifecourse Studies at UCL think early retirement can be traced right back to having had a tougher childhood. He goes on to explain what the findings might mean for policy in this area.

All sorts of things are likely to influence the point at which older people stop working. External factors like tax incentives to stay in work or changes to when we can claim our State Pension play a role. Then there are our working conditions, what’s going on with our health and how our personal circumstances change as we get older.

A substantial body of research has shown in recent years that people whose socioeconomic circumstances are poor are more likely to retire early than their better off peers. But in our research, we wanted to see if retiring early can additionally be traced back to earlier stages of the life course, more specifically, to having had a tougher life as a child or during mid adulthood.

In addition we wanted to dig a bit deeper into older people’s working lives, by giving a clearer and more detailed picture that describes entire patterns of employment trajectories (and not retirement timing only). To do this, we took into account the employment history between 50 and 70, including details on type of job people did, whether they worked full- or part-time or whether they were self-employed.

We used information collected by the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which has carried out interviews with more than 28,000 older people from 14 different countries. For our research, we focused on 5,857 men and women from the survey who wereaged 70 or over and who had provided details of their previous working and personal lives.

Work and retirement

We created clusters of their work and employment histories, and you can see in the table below the proportion of men and women in each cluster. On this basis we could link these clusters or types of employment histories to earlier adversity for both men and women.

Looking at types of employment histories between the ages of 50 and 70, we could see that men were more likely than women working in full-time employment or self-employed.. Women worked more likely in a part-time job or looked after home or family during those years.

Adversity in childhood

After modelling the effect of early life information and taking a range of background factors into account (e.g., among others, health conditions prior and during working life in mid adulthood), we were able to see that men who had experienced adversity in childhood were 5 percentage points more likely to have retired early (around age 55) from full-time employment, but they were less likely self-employed in late life. The same was true of men who experienced adversity in adulthood, although it is important to note that the effects were independent of each other.

Women who had suffered adversity in childhood were also less likely to be self-employed and retire later on. However, it was not related to early (around age 55) retirement from a full-time job. Women who faced adversity in adult life were more likely to work part-time or to look after the home/family than their peers who suffered no adversity during that period. This was not the case for childhood adversity.

Some other interesting things emerged from the research, which we believe provides a more comprehensive picture than has been provided before.

One very notable point was that early retirement was more closely associated with being in full-time employment rather than being self-employed. This could be because employed people have more restricted opportunities to work for longer (even if they want to) compared with their self-employed counterparts who have more freedom in deciding when to retire.

Food for thought

For those, including the Government’s Business Champion for Older Workers, who want to see thousands more older workers in British companies by 2022, this will be food for thought. More flexible retirement arrangements are likely to be necessary for employed workers who want to work longer, for example, through retirement schemes that allow a reduction of working time before leaving the labour market. This argument is further supported by the fact that such a cluster (where employed people reduced their working hours before retiring) was not found in our research.

Interesting differences emerged between men and women when it came to their employment histories and the way in which childhood adversity was linked to them. Whilst men were more likely to follow a path of full-time employment into retirement, women were more likely to have been continuously looking after home or family (without retirement) or have worked part-time.

When we factored in childhood adversity in the women’s lives, there was a close link with discontinuous employment in later life. This link was stronger for women than for men. Other research has suggested that traditional gender roles make it harder for women to gain a foothold in the labour market, a disadvantage that any adversity in childhood is likely to compound.

Looking across the lifecourse in this way sheds considerable new and important light on the timing of retirement, and offers some pointers for policymakers looking to increase the numbers of older workers. One specific implication is that certain measures are likely to work better for different age groups and should address different stages of the lifecourse.

There has been a great deal of focus on pension age and working conditions for older people. However, our research suggests that our childhood circumstances are also important and that policies to tackle childhood poverty and create good stable jobs for young people may also have a key role to play over time.

Early Adversity and Late Life Employment History—A Sequence Analysis Based on SHARE is research by Hanno Hoven, Nico Dragano, David Blane and Morten Wahrendorf and is published in Work, Aging and Retirement.