Kids do care for divorced parents
REBECCA DUBE
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
May 15, 2008 at 1:47 AM EDT
Fear not, divorced parents – your kids will still care for you when you're old.
That's the message coming out of a newly released British study of 5,000 households that finds adult children care for elderly parents according to need, not family history. So parents living alone, whether divorced or widowed, were twice as likely to receive help from their grown children as elderly parents with partners.
“Our research dispels the myth that modern Britain is becoming less caring,” said Karen Glaser, the lead author of the study and a gerontologist at King's College London. “While families experience more divorce and separation, many children continue to care for parents according to their needs.”
That's great for the British, but what about the rest of us? The new research contradicts previous U.S. studies that say parents who divorced get less help later in life from their children. Analyzing a seven-year survey of 2,087 parents, developmental psychologist Adam Davey of Temple University found that American children who experience a parent's divorce are half as likely to provide assistance to their fathers later in life.
Twenty 20 per cent were less likely to provide support to mothers.
Divorce's effect on support for parents as they age is a relatively new field of study, and one of growing importance. The number of Canadians aged 65 or older is expected to grow from 13 per cent of the population in 2005 to 25 per cent in 2036, according to Statistics Canada. Aging baby boomers are more likely to be divorced than previous generations were, so the question of whether adult children of divorce will care for their elderly parents is a timely one.
Dr. Glaser said the two studies may have produced different results because the U.S. research looked at parents aged 50 or older, while her sample focused on those aged 70 or older. Most people don't need more time-consuming help from their children until in their 80s. So perhaps divorce makes adult children more reticent to help their parents at first, she said, but when Mom and Dad get older and really need support, their children will step up to the plate.
Dr. Davey said the effects of divorce are – as always – more complicated than a good-bad dichotomy. Adult children are more likely to care for divorced parents if the parents remarry when the children are young, for instance, but less likely to help if they remarry when the children are grown.
“Marital transitions” – the preferred research euphemism for divorce – “affect families in a number of ways,” Dr. Davey said. “They can interrupt the relationship of support between a parent and child, and the evidence suggests that the continuity of support by parents and to parents matters.”
His research found that geographic distances explained much of the difference in caring for elderly parents – children are more likely to live farther from divorced parents, and thus are less available to care for them.
Maureen Osis, a gerontology nurse, family therapist and elder-care consultant in Calgary, said she's not aware of any Canadian research on adult children caring for divorced, elderly parents. But in her experience, she said, whether and how divorce affects caregiving later in life depends on many personal variables – the age of children when their parents divorced, the relationships within the family, and whether the parent in question is the father or mother, to name a few.
Divorced fathers are more likely to not get help, she said, because divorce often separates fathers and children.
Adult siblings often react differently to a parent's divorce, especially if it's a nasty one – the older child may sympathize with the mother, while the younger one supports the father, which will spill into their caregiving relationships.
“It really is influenced by the basic relationships people have maintained and the personality of the caregiver,” Ms. Osis said.