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Parents' Divorce Sways Old-Age Care From Children

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - When parents divorce, they may be less likely to get care in their old age from their adult children, a new study suggests.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - When parents divorce, they may be less likely to get care in their old age from their adult children, a new study suggests.

The study, of more than 2,000 older U.S. parents, found that divorce and remarriage influenced whether their adult children helped care for them as they aged.

Under some circumstances, the study found, adult children whose parents divorced were less likely to be helping them with their daily needs, like household chores and transportation.

The timing of the divorce appeared key, however, according to the researchers, led by Dr. Adam Davey of Temple University in Philadelphia.

Divorces during childhood showed less of an impact on the relationship between parents and adult children. More recent splits, on the other hand, seemed to dim the chances that adult children would care for an aging parent.

The problem, according to Davey, seems to be that some parents and children grow apart in the years after the divorce.

"It's not the divorce itself that affects the quality of the parent-child relationship, but it's what happens afterwards, such as geographical separation," he explained in a statement.

The findings, which appear in the journal Advances in Life Course Research, are based on surveys responses from 2,087 parents age 50 and older who reported on their 7,019 adult children.

In general, divorce predicted that an adult would be relatively less involved in the day-to-day care of their aging parents. The relationship was complex, however.

For example, when a father remarried early in a child's life, the child was more likely to be involved in his care later in life. The opposite was true when a father remarried when the child was an adult.

In addition, adult children who had lived a relatively longer time with a divorced mother were more likely to be involved in her care.

In other findings, older parents were much less likely to receive help from their step-children than from their biological children. This could have important implications for the growing number of older Americans with step-children, according to Davey.

"Society does not yet have a clear set of expectations for step-children's responsibility," he noted.

SOURCE: Advances in Life Course Research, September 2007.

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