Helping as a Component of Parent-Adult Child Relations

Abstract

Much research on intergenerational helping has focused on help from adult children to parents, but few studies have examined help in both directions. This article focuses on the frequency of several types of help between parents and adult children and the manner in which helping relationships evolve throughout the life course of adult children and their middle-aged and elderly parents. It focuses on the role of age, gender, and needs and availability of parents and children, using data from a local probability sample survey. The results show that most kinds of household help are given more frequently by parents to children than by children to parents. Parents above age 75 receive more help than they give, but even at that age, help occurs only in the minority of cases. There is no consistent gender pattern for parent-to-child help. Older mothers, however, receive substantially more help than do fathers. Infrequent but regular help with tasks of everyday living characterizes many of these relationships, and such help is not necessarily predicated on frailty or inability to do the task oneself. Implications of the results for future data collection are discussed.

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