February 2000

 

Impact of Divorce on Elderly Parents & Adult Children
Kathy Dothage, dothagem@missouri.edu

Even in later life, divorce can negatively affect the parent-child relationship, weaken economic ties, and reduce informal caregiving, according to a new study by Barbara Steinberg Schone, Ph.D., of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, and Liliana Pezzin, Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. They found out, that divorced elderly parents, particularly fathers, are less likely than are widowed elderly parents to have adult children willing to provide them with informal care.

Schone and Pezzin pointed out that the nuclear family is rapidly being replaced by new family patterns due to the high rate of divorce. Their study focused on unmarried (divorced or widowed) parents and their adult children, looking at four aspects of assistance. These were: parents living with adult children; financial assistance to adult children; and among disabled elderly parents, adult children's provision of informal care and parental use of formal (paid) care.

The researchers found that the ties to children may be weaker when parents are divorced and older, divorced parents may provide less financial assistance to their children. Additionally, disabled or frail parents may not be able to count on personal and economic support from their children. These findings raise concerns about future generations of elderly parents, who have experienced higher rates of divorce and therefore may place greater demands on public and social insurance programs for assistance.

The study also found that:

• Divorced fathers are especially vulnerable to receiving less care in later life due to weaker ties with their children. They are much less likely to live with an adult child and receive fewer hours of informal care.
• Ties to stepchildren are not as strong as ties to biological children. Elderly stepparents are more likely to purchase formal care and provide less cash assistance to their stepchildren than to biological children.
• Ties to children are further weakened by remarriage. Remarried parents receive less informal care from their children, purchase more hours of formal care, and provide less cash assistance to their children than parents who were married only once.

Source: AHCPR Research Activities, No. 229, September 1999, p. 11.

 

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