ABSTRACT
Objective
Time in childhood spent living apart from a biological parent or with a repartnered parent is theorized to disrupt norms of intergenerational solidarity and reduce transfers from adult children to parents. Parents’ partnership status when children are grown is also expected to influence children’s transfers. We estimate the probability of a past-year child-to-parent transfer as a function of childhood family structure and parents’ current partnership status.
Background
Changes in family structure across the life course are common and can have lasting effects on parent–child relationships. Prior research has focused on static measures of childhood family structure or focused only on parents’ later-life partnerships.
Method
We use dynamic measures of biological parents’ partnership status and coresidence with children from birth to age 17 and parents’ current partnership status to estimate the probability that a child transferred time or money to that parent in the last year (N = 8840 parent–child dyads). Data are from the 1968–2013 US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), including the 2013 Rosters and Transfers module.
Results
Adult children are most likely to make transfers to a parent who is currently partnered with their other biological parent and are more likely to support a currently unpartnered or repartnered mother than a father in the same status. Time in childhood spent living with a parent positively predicts adult children’s transfers to that parent.
Conclusion
Past and current family arrangements each contribute to adult children’s likelihood of providing time or money to parents, especially for fathers.