Adult children stepping in? Long-term care reforms and trends in children's provision of household support to impaired parents in the Netherlands

Recent long-term care (LTC) reforms in the Netherlands are illustrative of those taking place in countries with a universalistic LTC model based on extensive provision of state-supported services. They entail a shift from de-familialisation, in which widely available state-supported LTC services rel...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inAgeing and society Vol. 39; no. 1; pp. 112 - 137
Main Authors VAN DEN BROEK, THIJS, DYKSTRA, PEARL A., VAN DER VEEN, ROMKE J.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.01.2019
Subjects
Adult children
Adults
Aging
Children & youth
Daughters
Families & family life
Family roles
Households
Kinship
Long term health care
Nursing care
Older parents
Older people
Parent participation
Parent-child relations
Parents & parenting
Personal grooming
Population
Relatives
Social sciences
Trends
Sweden
Netherlands
Norway
Europe
Finland
Netherlands
substitution
universalism
intergenerational solidarity
long-term care
intergenerational support
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Recent long-term care (LTC) reforms in the Netherlands are illustrative of those taking place in countries with a universalistic LTC model based on extensive provision of state-supported services. They entail a shift from de-familialisation, in which widely available state-supported LTC services relieve family members from the obligations to care for relatives in need, to supported familialism, in which family involvement in care-giving is fostered through support and recognition for families in keeping up their caring responsibilities. Using data from four waves of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (N = 2,197), we show that between 2002 and 2014 the predicted probability that adult children provide occasional household support to impaired parents rose substantially. Daughters more often provided household support to parents than did sons, but no increase in the gender gap over time was found. We could not attribute the increase in children's provision of household support to drops in the use of state-supported household services. The finding that more and more adult children are stepping in to help their ageing parents fits a more general trend in the Netherlands of increasing interactions in intergenerational families.
ISSN:0144-686X
1469-1779
DOI:10.1017/S0144686X17000836