25 years of adult children’s caregiving in Denmark: demographic change, educational expansion, and longer working lives

Abstract This study examines how adult children’s informal caregiving in Denmark has evolved over the past 25 years, focusing on adults aged 52–67 and their caregiving for parents and parents-in-law between 1997 and 2022. This period is characterized by significant societal and institutional shifts, including increasing longevity, delayed childbearing, educational expansion, rising female labour force participation, and postponed retirement—developments that may have shaped caregiving practices. Using data from the Danish Longitudinal Study of Ageing, linked with population and education registry information for 1997–2022, we apply Kitagawa–Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition techniques and adjusted predictions from linear probability models to assess changes in caregiving patterns and their association with socio-economic and demographic factors. Results show that the proportion of 52–67-year-olds assisting a parent or in-law with at least one task in the past month increased from 27.9% in 1997 to 34.8% in 2022—a gain of 6.9 percentage points. Provision of informal care is more likely among men, individuals in their 50s, those with tertiary education, and those who are employed, but this pattern mainly reflects their greater likelihood of having a surviving parent or parent-in-law. Once parental survival is accounted for, socio-economic and demographic differences in caregiving largely disappear. We conclude that the increase in caregiving is driven primarily by a growing share of adult children with surviving parents or in-laws, coupled with an overall increase in the propensity to provide care, rather than by increasing socio-economic stratification in caregiving.