Residential care and care to community-dwelling parents: out-selection, in-selection and diffusion of responsibility

Research suggests that adult children are less likely to provide care to community-dwelling parents when beds in residential care settings are more widely available. The underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Drawing on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) on 1,214 impaired parent–child dyads from 12 countries, we find that adult children are less likely to provide care in countries where beds in residential care settings are more widely available because (a) parents’ care needs are less severe in such countries (out-selection hypothesis) and (b) adult children and impaired parents are less likely to share a household in such countries (in-selection hypothesis). Finally (c), after taking these two factors into account, adult children remain less likely to provide care in countries where beds in residential care settings are more widely available (diffusion of responsibility hypothesis). Plausibly, being able to rely on residential care undermines adult children's sense of urgency to step in and provide care to their parents

Chinese parent-child relationships in later life in the context of social inequalities

This paper examines how parent-child relationships vary against the backdrop of socio-economic inequalities evident in China. China is both an increasingly unequal and rapidly ageing country. Understanding how the relationships that older Chinese have with their children are associated with social inequalities is therefore of paramount importance. We do this by examining the effect of socio-economic indicators of the parent and child on their relationship in a multilevel, multinomial logit model of parentchild dyads using data from the Chinese Family Panel Study. First, the relationships we observe are not unidimensional and display complex patterns which deviate heavily from a ‘strong versus weak’ description of family ties. The results do not support a family displacement perspective of parent-child relationships but instead suggest that educational and financial resources facilitate support that is associated with greater emotional closeness and negates the need for support which places an emotional strain on the parent-child relationship.In diesem Artikel wird untersucht, wie die Eltern-Kind-Beziehungen vor dem Hintergrund sozialökonomischer Ungleichheiten, die in China evident sind, variieren. China ist gleichermaßen ein zunehmend von Ungleichheiten geprägtes wie ein rasch alterndes Land. Es ist daher von überragender Bedeutung zu verstehen, inwieweit die Beziehungen älterer Chinesen zu ihren Kindern mit sozioökonomischen Ungleichheiten assoziiert sind. Wir widmen uns dieser Frage, indem wir den Effekt sozialökonomischer Indikatoren für Eltern und Kinder auf deren Beziehung in einem multinominalen logistischen Mehrebenenmodell unter Verwendung von Daten der Chinese Family Panel Study für Eltern-Kind-Dyaden untersuchen. Die von uns beobachteten Beziehungen sind jedoch nicht eindimensional, sondern weisen komplexe Muster auf, die stark von einer "stark versus schwach"-Beschreibung der Familienbeziehungen abweichen. Die Ergebnisse stützen die Perspektive der Ablösung von der Familie in den Eltern-Kind-Beziehungen nicht, sondern legen stattdessen nahe, dass vorhandene Bildungs- und finanzielle Ressourcen eine Unterstützung erleichtern, die mit größerer emotionaler Nähe assoziiert ist und die Notwendigkeit solcher Unterstützung negieren, die der Eltern-Kind-Beziehung eine emotionalen Belastung auferlegen

Adult children stepping in? Long-term care reforms and trends in children's provision of household support to impaired parents in the Netherlands

Recent long-term care (LTC) reforms in the Netherlands are illustrative of those taking place in countries with a universalistic LTC model based on extensive provision of state-supported services. They entail a shift from de-familialisation, in which widely available state-supported LTC services relieve family members from the obligations to care for relatives in need, to supported familialism, in which family involvement in care-giving is fostered through support and recognition for families in keeping up their caring responsibilities. Using data from four waves of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (N = 2,197), we show that between 2002 and 2014 the predicted probability that adult children provide occasional household support to impaired parents rose substantially. Daughters more often provided household support to parents than did sons, but no increase in the gender gap over time was found. We could not attribute the increase in children's provision of household support to drops in the use of state-supported household services. The finding that more and more adult children are stepping in to help their ageing parents fits a more general trend in the Netherlands of increasing interactions in intergenerational families