Abstract
Do adult children affect the care elderly parents provide each other? We develop two models in which the anticipated behavior of adult children provides incentives for nondisabled elderly parents to increase care for their disabled spouses. The “demonstration effect” postulates that adult children learn from a parent’s example that family caregiving is appropriate behavior. The “punishment effect” postulates that adult children may punish parents who fail to provide spousal care by not providing future care for the nondisabled spouse if and when necessary. Thus, joint children act as a commitment mechanism, increasing the probability that elderly parents will provide care for their disabled spouses. We argue that stepchildren provide weaker incentives for spousal care because the attachment of a stepchild to a stepparent is likely to be weaker than the attachment of children to parents in a traditional nuclear family. Using data from the HRS, we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that joint children provide stronger incentives than stepchildren for nondisabled elderly parents to provide care for their disabled spouse.
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Notes
The word "attachment" conjures up the psychological literature on infants' attachment to their mothers (e.g., the work of Ainsworth and of Bowlby). We use “attachment" in a looser and broader sense.
Family economics, to the extent that it has employed game theoretic models, has relied almost exclusively on cooperative game theory to model family interactions. Cooperative game theory—Nash bargaining is the leading example—ensures Pareto-efficient outcomes. Lundberg and Pollak (1994, 2003) consider noncooperative models of family interactions and thus introduce the possibility of Pareto inefficiency. Cigno (1993) and Cigno et al. (2006) consider the notion of punishment in the context of what he calls a “family constitution”, a self-enforcing set of rules that determines intergenerational transfers behavior within families.
The strength of attachment need not be positively related to the duration of coresidence, but we assume that it is.
We describe the child as the offspring of a prior marriage regardless of whether the husband was legally married to the child’s mother.
Our focus on the fourth and fifth waves of AHEAD is due primarily to data limitations: although receipt of informal care is ascertained consistently since Wave 2 of the AHEAD survey (1995), spouses are not explicitly identified as caregivers except in these two waves. Data collected from the significantly smaller CODA cohort suffers from the same limitation.
We treat cohabiting couples as if they were legally married. Of the 3,895 households in the relevant waves of AHEAD, 988 were married couples with both partners living in the community. Of those, 522 met our inclusion criteria (i.e., one spouse was disabled while the other spouse was not). The corresponding numbers for the CODA survey are 1,490, 623 and 249.
Unfortunately, HRS provides no direct measure of the quality of adult children's emotional connection with a parent. Lacking a direct measure of attachment, we assume that the quality of an adult child's relationship to a parent is likely to be highest if the child's relationship with the parent has been continuous since the child's birth. This implies that, on average, the attachment between adult children and their parents will be stronger in traditional nuclear families than in blended families (i.e., families in which some of the children are stepchildren).
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the National Institute on Aging under grant 1 R01 AG024049. The views in this paper are those of the authors. No official endorsement by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality of the Department of Health and Human Services is intended or should be inferred.
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Pezzin, L.E., Pollak, R.A. & Schone, B.S. Long-term care of the disabled elderly: do children increase caregiving by spouses?. Rev Econ Household 7, 323–339 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-009-9057-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-009-9057-6