Family Care By Women To Old Parents And Its Determinants

Background and objectivesAs a result of the population ageing in China, demand of long-term care will keep increasing rapidly over the next decades. Family care is the most common form of long-term care for the elders. But the supply of care by adult children is being challenged:Living in different households increases the cost of family care; higher education level influences people’s participation in labor market and family devotion; rapid decline in fertility means less young people to take care of the elders. To establish a long-term care system suitable for China, we must first describe the current family care utilization, forecast the trends and potential capacity, and analyse the determinants to predict its future. The challenges in family care reflect in adult children’s difficulties of balancing work and family. Therefore, a perspective of service provider will be better in understanding the decision making inside family, and exploring the determinants of family care. In China, women are more sensitive to the difficulties than their husbands, since traditionally they take more responsibility for family members’health and now participate more and deeper in economy. So, this study is about the informal care by female adult children and the determinants of family care, especially focusing on the personal and family characteristics, women’s labor market participation, and other potential family care providers.Contents and methodsBased on the Anderson health services use model and Grossman health production model, adjusted by the research objectives and background in China, we develop a theoretical model of family care from the perspective of women, then establish a framework of factors influencing family care. We examine the data (5surveys, from1993to2006) from Chinese Health and Nutrition Survey by the University of North Carolina, focusing on18-52years old married women giving help to their parents over50years old on daily activities and shopping. The contents of this paper include the living arrangement of women and their old parents, characteristics of individuals and families, parents’demand of long-term care and women’s supply of family care, multivariate analysis of determinants of family care by women. Statistics analyses of indicators comparison include T test, λ2test, Wilcoxon rank sum test and Kruskal-Wallis H test. Whether family care happened last week is used as dependent variable in the logistic regression analysis of the determinants of family care by women to old parents.Results and key findingsMore women have been providing family care to their parents compared to in1990s. But region differences are significant:there are much less women in rural taking care of parents than in urban, and in central and west provinces, the proportion of women who provide family care is only half of it in east provinces.Living in another household does decrease women’s family care to parents. However, there is no obivious relationship between geographic distance and family care supply. The older’s spouse takes a large sharing of responsibility obviously, much larger than other children. And son is the main children caregiver with a significant sharing, but there is no similar evidence for daugnter’s responsibility. Daughter-in-law is likely to be the major source of family care in practice but with less quality services.Women with more education are more likely to give family care, but those old parents who just started to lose ability are tend to be ignored by women. Old women get more care from women. Women working full time in agriculture, services sector or small and medium enterprises are more likely not to give care.Although not obviously yet, with the postponement of fertility and the increase in elder population, women will face more pressure in taking care of young children and several old parents.