Abstract
With an aging U.S. population, there is an increasing need for elderly care. One aspect of family care that is poorly understood is the trade-off for the generation of grandparents between the provision of care and support for their elderly parents and provision of care for their grandchildren. I evaluate the impact of a parent’s death on the likelihood of an individual providing child care to grandchildren using the Health and Retirement Study and find that such a death leads to an increase in the likelihood of child care, suggesting that many grandparents would provide child care services if they did not have prior elderly care and support obligations. There is a positive effect of this additional care of grandchildren on fertility for individuals’ only daughters and daughters who do not live within 10 miles of grandparents. However, there is no increase in labor force participation for these groups.
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Notes
See Kearney et al. (2022) for a detailed exploration of other possible causes.
Others have provided descriptions of this generation using alternate data sources. For example, Wiemers and Bianchi (2015) use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to explore recent trends in the “sandwich generation.”
This age cohort also corresponds to the original HRS cohort, the only one surveyed in 1996, while other cohorts were added later. Eliminating the requirement that individuals are present in the data for at least three years does not change the magnitude or significance of the results.
If only a range of childcare hours is given by respondents and spouses who do not know or refuse to give the number of hours provided, the minimum and maximum range values are averaged to create care estimates for such individuals.
Several studies find that becoming a grandparent reduces a grandmother’s labor force participation (Frimmel et al., 2017; Ho, 2015; Rupert & Zanella, 2018). Because 99% of households already have a grandchild in the first wave that is utilized, this study is not complicated by the time use impacts of becoming a grandparent.
If a respondent is more likely to retire upon a parent’s death, this frees up time to care for grandchildren and may increase care. If the inclusion of the young senior household’s employment status as a potential mediating variable in the main regressions does not change the relationship between the number of parents alive and hours spent caring for grandchildren, however, then the care time reallocation mechanism is supported over the employment mechanism.
The HRS is a biennial panel, thus each l period is separated by two years.
Table 11 shows a similar change in hours once the sample is cut to households that ever provide child care.
Close proximity is defined by a 10 mile distance from respondents following questions in the survey instrument.
The sum of all transfers to any parent significantly decreases following a parental death.
Each of the potential mechanisms is endogenous. Therefore, the causal relationship between each mechanism and the amount of grandchild care provided cannot be separately identified. It is also true that I cannot fully rule out each of these other mechanisms as contributing to the negative impact of parents being alive on provision of child care to grandchildren.
Self-reported health is scaled from 1 to 5, where a 1 indicates excellent health and a 5 indicates poor health. The mental health outcome measure is the score on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CESD) scale based on 8 indicators. A point is assigned for each indicator where poor mental health is indicated so that the range of values is between 0 and 8 with higher numbers indicating worse mental health.
See Table 2 (columns (5) and (6))) for comparison.
Money have gone to elderly parents or have been saved in case it was needed for elderly parents prior to their death. After the death, that money may then be available to give to adult children.
There are no extensive margin fertility impacts found. Fertility and employment results are robust to the inclusion of a control for financial transfers, suggesting again that a change in child care provision is likely the main driver of child impacts. Fertility results may not indicate effects on completed fertility, but possibly just delayed fertility.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful for helpful feedback from Shelly Lundberg, Esra Kose, Francisca Antman, Catalina Herrera Almanza, Lucie Schmidt, Jiyoon Kim, and Conor Carney, as well as participants at the Western Economic Association International Conference, Eastern Economic Association Conference, and Liberal Arts College Labor and Public Conference. All errors are my own.
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Appendix
Appendix
Tables 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, Figs. 4, 5, 6, 7
Event study of the impact of parents alive on main respondent employment status. Note: The respondent work status is equal to 0 if the respondent is not working full-time and is equal to 1 if the respondent is working full-time. Sample restricted to respondents that have exactly one living parent (the oldest generation) that passes away after at least one grandchild is born or they have no living parents throughout the sample (interpreted as the never-treated, where having a living parent is considered the treatment), but they do have grandchildren. Survey waves are two years apart. The omitted relative year, 0, is first survey year in which a parent has not been alive for any amount of time. A death shows up in − 2, but the care information reflects some period of time for which the parent was still alive. 95% confidence intervals are shown. Extreme relative periods are absorbed into t = −10 and t = 6 indicators, while observations are dropped that do not contain at least two waves of data before the death and two after the death. Controls include indicators for five year age bins for the respondent, survey wave indicators, and household fixed effects
Event study of the impact of parents alive on main respondent self-reported health status. Note: The respondent self-reported health is scaled from 1 to 5, where a 1 indicates excellent health and a 5 indicates poor health. Sample restricted to respondents that have exactly one living parent (the oldest generation) that passes away after at least one grandchild is born or they have no living parents throughout the sample (interpreted as the never-treated, where having a living parent is considered the treatment), but they do have grandchildren. Survey waves are two years apart. The omitted relative year, 0, is first survey year in which a parent has not been alive for any amount of time. A death shows up in − 2, but the care information reflects some period of time for which the parent was still alive. 95% confidence intervals are shown. Extreme relative periods are absorbed into t = −10 and t = 6 indicators, while observations are dropped that do not contain at least two waves of data before the death and two after the death. Controls include indicators for five year age bins for the respondent, survey wave indicators, and household fixed effects
Event study of the impact of parents alive on mental health status. Note: The mental health outcome measure is the score on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CESD) scale based on 8 indicators. A point is assigned for each where poor mental health is indicated so that the range of values is between 0 and 8 with higher numbers indicating worse mental health. Sample restricted to respondents that have exactly one living parent (the oldest generation) that passes away after at least one grandchild is born or they have no living parents throughout the sample (interpreted as the never-treated, where having a living parent is considered the treatment), but they do have grandchildren. Survey waves are two years apart. The omitted relative year, 0, is first survey year in which a parent has not been alive for any amount of time. A death shows up in − 2, but the care information reflects some period of time for which the parent was still alive. 95% confidence intervals are shown. Extreme relative periods are absorbed into t = −10 and t = 6 indicators, while observations are dropped that do not contain at least two waves of data before the death and two after the death. Controls include indicators for five year age bins for the respondent, survey wave indicators, and household fixed effects
Event study of the impact of parents alive on household financial transfers to adult children. Note: The transfer outcome indicates whether the household gave financial assistance to any child. Sample restricted to respondents that have exactly one living parent (the oldest generation) that passes away after at least one grandchild is born or they have no living parents throughout the sample (interpreted as the never-treated, where having a living parent is considered the treatment), but they do have grandchildren. Survey waves are two years apart. The omitted relative year, 0, is first survey year in which a parent has not been alive for any amount of time. A death shows up in − 2, but the care information reflects some period of time for which the parent was still alive. 95% confidence intervals are shown. Extreme relative periods are absorbed into t = −10 and t = 6 indicators, while observations are dropped that do not contain at least two waves of data before the death and two after the death. Controls include indicators for five year age bins for the respondent, survey wave indicators, and household fixed effects
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Carney, M.H. Trade-offs in intergenerational family care provision. Rev Econ Household 22, 563–593 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-023-09668-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-023-09668-4