Families as Context: Interactions Among Adult Siblings in Providing Support for Elderly Parents in Rural China

Background and Purpose: Caring for aging parents is usually a shared responsibly among all adult siblings in a family. Care provided by one child may be affected by the availability of alternative care from other siblings. While most existing studies of family care have relied on a single or primary caregiver, the issues of interdependence among adult siblings in providing old-age care have not been well studied. Using a unique dataset that contains information of all the children in a family, this study addresses two research questions: 1) whether and how do the changes in the care involvement of a child's sibling(s) affect this child's own care involvement? 2) Do the gender and life circumstances of the child in terms of marital status, childcare responsibilities, and the proximity with the parent affect such relationships?

Method: A stratified multistage sampling method was used to randomly select 1,696 older adults (60+) in Chaohu region, Anhui province in 2001. Among them, 1,391 were followed up in 2003. We limited our analyses to the 5,110 adult children of the 1,119 respondents who participated in both surveys. Support was assessed by how often respondents received help from each child and his/her spouse with 1) household tasks, and 2) personal care (ranging from 0=none to 4=everyday). We constructed an addictive support score from the two variables for each child, and computed a sibling support score by adding the support scores of all the siblings of each child. We distinguished the support of one's brother(s) from one's sister(s). OLS regression analyses were conducted to predict the change in a child's support scores between 2001 and 2003 with the change in the sibling support scores during this period. We further created four interaction terms between the changes in sibling support scores between 2001 and 2003 and the child's gender, marital status, caregiving responsibilities, and the proximity from the parent in 2001, respectively. We rerun the OLS regressions adding the interaction terms. Results:

About 13% of the children changed their care involvement over the two year period. The results of regression analyses showed that living closer to parents and parents' poor health associated with increasing support from children over time. An increase in both brother(s)' and sister(s)' support enhanced the support provided by the child over time. Such a change was conditioned upon the gender and life circumstances of the child. Daughters were more responsive to their sisters' care involvement whereas sons are more responsive to their brothers' care involvement. Those who lived farther from their parents and those who had childcare responsibilities were less responsive to the changes in siblings' care involvement. Conclusions and Implications: Results of this study seem to show a “mutual enforcement” rather than an “offsetting” pattern in adult siblings' old-age support in rural China. Such a pattern seems to be gender-specific, and is affected by adult children's other obligations. Program designed to promote caregiving of adult children may focus on the children who live closer to their parents and who have fewer childcare responsibilities.