Abstract
AbstractIncreasing longevity has led to a rising number of adult children who are at higher ages when they provide care for their parents. Drawing on the lifecourse approach and exchange theory, the paper addresses similarities and differences in parent care between late middle-aged and older adult children. The study uses the UK Household Longitudinal Study, restricting the analysis sample to individuals aged 50 and older with a living parent or parent-in-law. It presents multivariate models to examine differences between late middle-aged (aged 50–64) and older (aged 65+) children in being a parent carer, providing intensive care, the duration of parent care and providing selected types of help to parents. The involvement in parent care increases among women up to the end of their seventh decade of life and for men up to their eighth decade of life. At higher ages, the proportion of parent carers decreases more strongly for women than men. Older carers have shorter care-giving episodes than younger carers, but there is no significant difference in the type of care provided. Even past retirement age, parent care remains classed and gendered, with women from lower social classes having the highest likelihood of providing intensive parent care in old age. Having dependent children or living in a non-marital union depress the likelihood of caring for a parent even past retirement age.
Highlights
Adult children are an important source of help and care for older people in the United Kingdom (UK)
Parent care is most common for women and men in their fifties, when 17 per cent of women and 12 per cent of men reported care-giving for a parent or parent-in-law
Summing up the findings about differences in parent care between late mid-aged and older children, the analyses demonstrate a high level of involvement, including intensive parent care, at and after age 65, and a drop at the highest ages
Summary
Adult children are an important source of help and care for older people in the United Kingdom (UK). The lifecourse approach conceives of parent care as an age-graded event that unfolds in the cultural and institutional context of individual lives (Giele and Elder, 1998) According to this approach, the prevalence, timing and duration of providing parent care will vary with the changing circumstances of the individual in other life domains. Child care and full-time employment can restrict individuals’ time for parent care, leading to an exploration of alternatives to their own full engagement These explorations can be examined from an exchange theoretical perspective (White and Klein, 2002). Past research has shown that full-time employment reduces the likelihood of becoming a care-giver (Henz, 2004; Leopold et al, 2014; Moussa, 2019) If this barrier falls at the time of retirement, the rates of providing parent care should increase (Hypothesis 1)
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