Support Now to Care Later: Intergenerational Support Exchanges and Older Parents' Care Receipt and Expectations

Older parents' previous support exchanges with adult children could influence which child currently provides care or which child they expect to provide care in the future. Distinguishing between support and care, we investigated how different types of past support exchanges with children were associated with care receipt and expectations from the parent's perspective.

Older parents (N = 190; Mage = 79.98) reported on exchanges of tangible and nontangible support, and provision of childcare support with each of their adult children (N = 709; Mage = 52.69) in two waves of the Family Exchanges Study (2008 and 2013). Multilevel, within-family, logistic regression models were estimated to examine how past patterns of support exchanges were associated with which child the older parent receives or expects to receive care from.

Parents with functional limitations at Wave 2 were more likely to receive care from children whom they received more tangible support from at the prior wave. Parents without current limitations more likely named children whom they previously provided childcare support to and received more tangible support from as their expected future caregiver.

This study distinguished different types of support to examine unique pathways to received and expected care within families. Taking the older parent's perspective, these findings endorse previous studies that emphasize continuity in the transition from receiving tangible support to receiving and expecting care from adult children. The findings also suggest the importance of older parents' childcare support given to adult children, highlighting reciprocity in intergenerational care exchanges.