Intergenerational help and care among members of the family belong to the most important dimensions of contemporary welfare regimes. Recent research has indicated that a major part of caring responsibilities is placed on the middle-aged generation. The ‘pivot generation’ is expected to provide help to their adult children and grandchildren as well as to their ageing parents. It has been hypothesised that people helping their parents are discouraged from looking after their grandchildren because they experience lack of energy and time. Using data from the four waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), this paper analyses the effect of providing help to ageing parents on the likelihood and intensity of looking after grandchildren. It takes a four-generation perspective: grandchildren, children, parents and grandparents. The results show that the support of parents is not associated with less-frequent and less-intense care of grandchildren. On the contrary, a positive association between caring responsibilities has been observed. The highest tendency to care for grandchildren has been found for people regularly helping their parents. This effect holds after controlling for grandparents’ characteristics and country effects. It is suggested that caring responsibilities tend to accumulate rather than compete with one another and therefore could represent a potential risk of overburden for those who have a general tendency to care.

There is a sharp discrepancy between the emphasis being placed on active ageing and labour market participation in older age and the high unemployment rates observed among older workers. Cross-sectional data in the Czech Republic consistently present evidence of job insecurity and employment vulnerability in older age groups. Aggregated data and statistical indices do not, however, offer a suffi ciently detailed picture of the social processes (e.g. exit from the labour market, duration of unemployment, and exit from unemployment) behind the numbers. This article takes a dynamic look at the position of older workers in the labour market by investigating transitions between employment and unemployment using a sub-sample of older workers (50 year and over) from the Czech EU-SILC, who were interviewed repeatedly in a panel survey between 2004 and 2009. The authors use survival analysis methods to study the time-dependence of transitions into and out of unemployment and both with and without covariates. The results suggest that older workers are not at a higher risk of exiting the labour market (compared to other age groups), but once they are unemployed, their odds of getting back into employment are signifi cantly lower. Even when controls (such as education level) are included in the model this disadvantage persists. Interestingly, while education generally protects people from labour market exit, this protective effect is weaker among older workers.