A Matter of Time Coordination? Adult Children and Spouses’ Paid-Work and Time Transfers to Parents

Ching-Yi A. Shieh, National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Using the 1998-2008 Health and Retirement Study, this paper examines how adult children and their spouses’ paid-work affect the provision of support to elderly parents. Amounts of time spent on helping parents with person-need and errand are assessed. Cross-sectional time-series random effect models are utilized for the statistical analysis. The preliminary results indicate that adult children give more help to parents than their spouses, and the amounts of transfers increase with time. Self-employed adult children and children with two jobs spent longer hours assisting their fathers, providing evidence to support the time-flexibility hypothesis. In terms of spouses’ transfers, when spouses are dual job owners, their ADL help to mothers-in-law decrease. Parallel to the time availability hypothesis, spouses with longer work hours provide less IADL assistance to their fathers-in-law.