Help from Family, Friends, and Neighbors: Comparing Older Adults with and without Close Kin

• In Event: Aging and Intergenerational Supports: Economic and Care Resources Across Generations

Abstract

Family members play a critical role in providing support during periods of illness and economic hardship, thereby enhancing health outcomes and alleviating financial strain (Arora, 2016; Bianchi et al., 2008; Dalton & LaFave, 2017). Traditionally, spouses and adult children have served as the primary sources of such support (Wolff et al., 2018). However, recent demographic shifts in the second half of life have led to an increasing number of older adults who lack these traditional sources of family support (Brown & Lin, 2022; Kennedy & Ruggles, 2014; Margolis & Verdery, 2017; Spillman et al., 2020). In 2015, approximately 15 million individuals aged 50 and older did not have a living spouse or biological children – the so-called “kinless,” and this figure is projected to increase to 21 million by 2060. Projections suggest that racial disparities in “kinlessness” among older adults will widen in the coming decades, further exacerbating existing racial differences in Black Americans’ greater reliance on fictive kin such as friends, neighbors, and other nonrelatives in old age (Taylor et al., 2013; Verdery & Margolis, 2017). The growing population of kinless older adults raises an important question: who will provide care and financial resources for these individuals when their need for assistance arises?

 

This paper draws on newly available data in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) which codes responses to open-ended questions on time and money help exchanged with family and non-relatives during the pandemic to ask whether the prevalence of help of time or money given or received differed between older adults with and without close kin. Several important patterns emerge from these new data. First, we find that there are no differences between kinless and non-kinless older adults in the prevalence of engaging in the exchange of time and money with family and friends. Over half of older adults in both groups gave or received time or financial support to or from someone outside of their household during the height of the pandemic between May 2020 and May 2021. Second, we find that exchange with friends and family members is very common for both kinless and non-kinless older adults. For example, among those who engaged in exchange, 10% of non-kinless and 20% of kinless older adults received time help from a friend or neighbor. This exchange of resources with friends and family is compared to 30% of the non-kinless who received time help from an adult child, a traditional source of time help. Finally, the source of time and financial support given or received differs between kinless and non-kinless older adults. Kinless older adults are much more likely to engage in exchange with family members of the same generation (siblings or other family members) while non-kinless older adults exchanged more with adult children. The paper provides a counterweight to fears of increasing kinlessness among older adults leading to a crisis of unmet care needs.  

Authors

• Emily Wiemers, Syracuse University
  Presenting Author

• I-Fen Lin, University of Missouri-Columbia
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Judith A. Seltzer, University of California - Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Janecca Chin, Bowling Green State University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Anna Wiersma Strauss, Indiana University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• V. Joseph Hotz, The University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Co-Author