Socio-demographic, Economic and Structural Correlates of Intergenerational Support of the Elderly in Iran

Abstract

This study explores the effect of sociological and demographic factors on the intergenerational support system between adult children and their parents. More specifically it attempts to assess the impact of structural and socio-demographic factors, such as living arrangements, number of children, gender, age, and socio economic status of the adult children and their respective parents, on emotional, financial and instrumental support of the parents in Varamin, a southeastern town in Tehran province, Iran. A representative sample of 381 adult children responded to questions on various aspects of their relationship with their living elderly parents, and the kinds of supports they provide to and receive from them. Results show clear differences between mothers and fathers in their intergenerational exchange patterns. Mothers tend to give and receive more than fathers. Daughter and sons also differ in their exchanges with their parents. Sons support their parents more than daughters but when controlling for socio economic characteristics and structural opportunities of the child, the discrepancy between them tends to decrease significantly. While the flow of exchange and reciprocity persists in intergenerational exchange relationships, the scale tips increasingly in favor of elderly parents as they age or experience poorer health status.

Providing instrumental support to older parents of multi-child families in China: are there different within-family patterns?

“…Regarding adult children's characteristics, consistent with prior studies (Ghazi-Tabatabaei and Karimi, 2011;Ren and Treiman, 2015), having at least one co-residing child is an important factor in predicting the highly differentiated within-family pattern. A co-residing child may provide primary and routine care to older parents, raising the average family level and inevitably widening the gap of care involvement from siblings as backups.…”

Scoping Review: Intergenerational Resource Transfer and Possible Enabling Factors

“…These studies investigated older people's health status, employment status, and financial resources and the availability of other resources to them. Those who reported poor health status or had more health problems (e.g., activities of daily living problems) were more likely to receive different kinds of transfers from their children [1,2,5,10,11,13,18,19,22,23,27,28,[31][32][33]37,38,43,[45][46][47]50,51,56,59,61,62,78].…”

“…Many studies investigated the relationship between the older generation's demographic factors (e.g., age, gender, marital status, education) and upward transfers from the younger generation. Most studies suggest that transfer receivers' age was positively related to financial transfers [1,2,11,15,51,67,78], instrumental transfers [1,2,5,15,19,23,28,35,37,43,51], emotional transfers [2,67,68], and overall transfers [27,31,48,58,62,75]. However, Albuquerque (2014) [10] found little impact of age on the probability of older people's receiving money.…”

“…Studies showed that women tend to receive more transfers of different kinds from their children than men [2,8,11,15,18,21,24,27,31,32,47,48,51,56,62,67,68,71,75,77].…”

“…Social support systems are subject to the potentially confounding influences of demographic trends, economic conditions, social norms, and public policy development [1,2]. On the one hand, supporting and caring for older people has been a prevalent concern across the world.…”