Intergenerational Caregiving Patterns, Living Arrangements, and Life Satisfaction of Adults in Mid and Later Life in China

While the health implications of intergenerational caregiving have been broadly investigated in the aging literature, less is known about caregivers in four-generation families and their living arrangements. Using 2011 and 2013 waves of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (N = 12,914 obs....

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Research on aging 2022-08, Vol.44 (7-8), p.545-559
Main Authors: Liu, Jingwen, Chen, Feinian
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult children
Adults
Aging
Caregivers
Caregiving
Grandchildren
Households
Life satisfaction
Living arrangements
Parents & parenting
Retirement
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:While the health implications of intergenerational caregiving have been broadly investigated in the aging literature, less is known about caregivers in four-generation families and their living arrangements. Using 2011 and 2013 waves of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (N = 12,914 obs.), we document enhanced life satisfaction of grandchild caregivers and sandwich caregivers caring for both grandchildren and parents than non-caregivers. When further taking living arrangements into consideration, we find that parent caregivers also benefit from care provision when not living with their parents and sandwich caregivers only have an advantage when co-residing with care recipients with adult children present in households. By contrast, grandchild caregivers living with grandchildren show substantially higher life satisfaction no matter adult children are present or not. The subgroup comparison suggests that females and rural residents enjoy psychological advantages over their male counterparts and urban counterparts in grandparenting within skipped-generation households and sandwich caregiving.
ISSN:0164-0275
1552-7573
DOI:10.1177/01640275211058433