Geographic Proximity to Parents, Intergenerational Support Exchange, and Migration Within Germany

Bettina Hünteler,Clara H Mulder

doi:10.1007/s10680-020-09558-w

Abstract

Previous research on internal migration has emphasised the importance of local ties to family members outside the household, and to parents in particular. Family members who live close to an individual’s place of residence represent a form of local social capital that could make migrating costlier, and therefore less likely. This idea has been empirically supported. Yet, how family ties bind remains largely unexplained. We assume that intergenerational support is a manifestation of local social capital, and that spatial proximity is needed for support to be exchanged. Thus, we used mediation analysis that includes explicit measures of support exchanges between parents and their adult–children born in 1971–1973, 1981–1983, and 1991–1993 to explain the binding effect of living close to parents. Logistic regression models of migrating a distance of more than 40 km were conducted using eight waves of the German pairfam data. Living close to one’s parents was indeed found to be negatively associated with the likelihood of migration, and part of this association could be explained through intergenerational support: the more the instrumental support an adult child exchanged with her/his parent, the less likely she/he was to migrate. Receiving emotional support from the parents was associated with an increase in migration propensity. Neither giving emotional help nor receiving help with childcare functioned as mediators. It thus appears that adult children are particularly likely to value the proximity of their parents when they are exchanging instrumental support, but that the emotional bond between adult children and their parents can often be maintained over longer distances.

Highlights

Internal migration—that is, a long-distance move within a country—is often seen as a way for people to increase their spatial flexibility and widen their options for pursuing paid work and higher education
We found that the frequency of instrumental support was significantly and positively related to living in close spatial proximity to the parent (Appendix 2)
Despite the broad acknowledgement of the importance of the location of fam‐ ily members in migration decisions, the underlying mechanisms of why living in close proximity to family members tends to deter migration have only rarely been explored in previous research

Summary

Introduction

Internal migration—that is, a long-distance move within a country—is often seen as a way for people to increase their spatial flexibility and widen their options for pursuing paid work and higher education. A large body of research has focused on the eco‐ nomic determinants of internal migration. Social factors have been found to play a part in internal migration. As a rapidly expanding body of the literature has shown, living in close spatial proximity to family members appears to greatly decrease the probability of migrating (Kan 2007; Michielin et al 2008; Mulder and Malmberg 2011, 2014; Mulder and Wagner 2012; Clark et al 2017; Ermisch and Mulder 2018). The decrease in the likelihood that people will migrate if their parents live nearby seems to be partly explained by actual face-to-face contact between parents and their adult–children (Ermisch and Mulder 2018). The question of why this contact matters has yet to be answered

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Results

Conclusion