Adult Children's Responsiveness to Parental Needs During the Pandemic

Guided by the life-course principles of linked lives embedded in historical time and place, we investigated whether nonresident adult children provided financial and time assistance to parents in response to their needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adult children are an important source of support for older adults during crises, yet their ability to help parents may have been constrained during the pandemic.

Data came from the 2016, 2018 and 2020 waves of the Health and Retirement Study. We employed three analytic strategies. First, we examined how nonresident adult children responded to parental needs during the pandemic. Second, we compared the financial and time assistance received during the pandemic with earlier periods. Third, we assessed whether support patterns varied depending on the severity of the pandemic in places where parents lived. All analyses used linear probability models, adjusting for pre-pandemic characteristics.

Parents facing economic hardship more often received money help and those experiencing difficulty buying food for non-financial reasons more often received time help from adult children compared to those without such challenges. Moreover, both financial and time assistance from adult children increased during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic levels. Hardships increased the probability of receiving money and time help from adult children when parents lived in areas with a high level of pandemic severity.

Adult children became more responsive to parental needs during the COVID-19 pandemic, underscoring the importance of linked lives across generations during times of crisis.