Parental Human Capital Investment and Old-Age Support from Children: A Family Life-Course Analysis

Background: The family life-course perspective has been used by child development researchers extensively to demonstrate the differences in parent-child relations within families in the early years, but it has been largely ignored by gerontologists. Existing caregiving studies tend to center on proximal factors, such as adult children’s current resources and constraints, and ignore distal factors, such as early-life parent-child relationships. This study fills the gap by investigating the effect of parents' early human capital investment on the nature and dynamics of family caregiving for older adults.

Methods: This study used 39,764 adult children and 11,136 parents in 11 waves of data from the Health and Retirement Study from 1992 to 2012. Specifically, we focused on how parents' early human capital investment (education) influences children's caregiving behaviors (financial transfer, instrumental care, knowledge support), and how later-life investments (e.g. child care, financial transfer, and bequest) from parents moderate the effect of education. We addressed the endogeneity problem with a family fixed effect strategy.

Results: The US-based estimates uncover that parental early human capital investment on children has a significant positive effect on children’s financial transfers and knowledge support. Higher educated children are less sensitive to regard parental later-life investment as caregiving incentives.

Conclusions: Intergenerational transfers linking parental investment in human capital of children to old-age support stem from self-enforcing reciprocity. The findings suggest that by increasing their human capital investment in children’s early life, parents may be able to receive a greater amount of old-age support in their own later life. Examples will be provided of ways in how the family life-course approach could enhance caregiving interventions and policy implications.