Longevity, Linked Lives, and Generational Time: Does Changing Late-Life Activity Impact Older Adults’ Help to Their Adult Children?

Although a growing proportion of older adults lead active and productive lives until later ages, little is known about how they balance paid work, other forms of productive aging, family, and leisure, or how this balancing may affect the interconnectedness of different generations. Using longitudinal, population-based data from Denmark, we investigate informal intergenerational help provision over time and the factors influencing the observed change from 1997 to 2017 for adults aged 52-77. Applying the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique, we analyze trends in intergenerational help by older adults and examine whether changes in helping behavior are attributable to active aging or other changes within the population. We observe distinctly different helping behavior trends by age: a lower percentage of individuals aged 52-62 provided help in 2017 than in 1997, whereas a larger percentage of those aged 67-77 provided help in 2017 than in 1997. Although the increase in work participation does not add to declining levels of help to adult children, declining grandparenthood had a significant negative effect on helping behavior. In contrast, for those with grandchildren, helping behavior intensified over time.