Why do adult children support their parents?(Report)

INTRODUCTION

Intergenerational relationship arrangements only recently have begun to attract the attention of German researchers, but there already exists a multitude of findings, especially regarding relationships between grown-up children and their parents. These are commonly characterized by frequent contact, emotional closeness, significant (non-) material transfers despite the fact that grown-up children and parents rarely live in the same household (Kohli and Kunemund, 2001; Szydlik, 2000; 2003). Emotional support and material assistance are two main aspects of intergenerational solidarity (Bengtson and Reports, 1991). These are not just personal matters. Understanding why and under what conditions children support their aging parents is of increasing social relevance due to the aging of the population and the limits on welfare state guarantees of long-term nursing care for the old and infirm. The research shows that in Germany adult children are the main source of emotional, social, and instrumental assistance for their aging parents, albeit with variation in the degree of assistance. The present analysis was designed to complement the existing detailed descriptions of exchange patterns associated with children's helping behavior with an investigation of their underlying connecting mechanisms.

The critical discourse surrounding the myth of the modern "isolated nuclear family" (Parsons, 1943, p. 27) diverted attention away from the task of building meso-level. theories for the explanation of intergenerational arrangements. Only a few simple causal mechanisms have been identified in explanations of children's helping behavior. These highlight four factors: feelings of intimacy or attachment, the principle of reciprocity, the norm of obligation, and altruism (Cox, 1987; Kalmijn, 2005; Katz et al., 2003; Kohli and Kunemund, 2003; Kunemund and Rein, 1999; Silverstein et al., 1995). These four factors apparently have never been tested comparatively in a single model. Thus, the first goal of this study is to investigate the explanatory power of these four factors relative to one another.

The previous literature has also ignored the consideration that the relationships among the factors may be dynamic over time. Most German studies focus on the late stages of intergenerational relations only (Baltes and Mayer, 1999; Tesch-Romer et al., 2006), so data and findings about earlier parent-child arrangements or the changes in these arrangements over time are rare. However, it is reasonable to expect that the supply of and demand for help undergoes a fairly systematic change during the course of the typical relationship such that the "over benefitting start" in favor of the child (Hollstein and Bria, 1998, p. 14) reverses in parent's old age. Additionally, intergenerational relations are dynamic in another sense: the current characteristics of any individual relationship depend on the history of that relationship. Based on the assumption of a path dependency, it can be expected that the effect of experiences in the early stages of the relationship will be evident in its later stages. Therefore, the study's second goal is to isolate any differences in the correlation matrix among age-groups.

The following research is based on data taken from the pilot study of the German PAIRFAM-study (Feldhaus and Huinink, 2006). (1) The data provide information on intergenerational dyads and encompassed respondents with a wide range of ages. This allowed a comparative study of different stages of the parent-child relationship.

REASONS TO PROVIDE SUPPORT

Reciprocity