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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| The division of parent care between spouses | | Author(s) | Maximiliane E Szinovacz, Adam Davey |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 28, part 4, May 2008 |
| Pages | pp 571-597 |
| Source | http://www.journals.cambridge.org/ASO |
| Keywords | Spouses as carers ; Children [offspring] as carers ; Women as carers ; Men as carers ; Parents ; Longitudinal surveys ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | Research on the division of family work has focused on household work and child-care to the exclusion of other domains, whereas studies on caregiving for older people typically ignores spouses' support to caregivers. The authors apply an approach that is typical of research on spouses' division of family work in caring for parents, in that the theoretical model focuses on the "cultural mandates" that guide spouses' division of care, namely gender ideologies about appropriate roles, kinship obligations, and taboos against cross-gender personal care. Other predictors of the spousal division of care drawn from economic and health care utilisation models are also examined. The analyses use pooled data on 1449 care occasions from the first five waves of the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS). It was found that most couples to some extent share parent care, and that the involvement of husbands depended on a complex interplay of cultural mandates and contexts. Husbands participated most in personal care for parents if the care was mandated by kinship obligations (they cared more for their own than the wife's parents), and by cross-gender care taboo (they cared more for fathers than mothers). Other cultural contexts (such as race), a spouse's other commitments, health-related ability, resources (including support from the parents of other children) and care burden also played a role. The findings demonstrate that decisions to care for parents emerge from complex negotiations among spouses and their children and siblings - in other words, that parental care is a family endeavour. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-080425006 A |
| Classmark | P6:SN: P6:SS: P6:SH: P6:SG: SR: 3J: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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