Abstract In late middle age, individuals may face competing demands on their time and financial resources from elderly parents and young adult children. This study uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine changes over time in the probability of having children and living parents for women age 45 to 64. We compare two cohorts: those born in the 1920s and 1930s and those born in the 1940s and 1950s. We find that there has been a dramatic increase in the probability of having children and living parents and that this increase has been driven by changes in life expectancy of the parent generation. We further examine obligations of money and co-residence for women in the later cohort. We find that while women may not always face concurrent demands from parents and children, approximately thirty percent of them have provided support to both parents and children at some point in the past. The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the Sloan Foundation grant 2011-6-24
