Intergenerational Care And The Health Of The Elderly

With the implementation of the "universal two-child" policy and the imperfect social childcare system,more and more middle-aged and elderly people have assumed the responsibility of taking care of their grandchildren.According to a survey by the research center on aging,66.47 percent of middle-aged and elderly people choose to help their children look after their grandchildren,and heavy care tasks will directly affect their health.At the same time,as China's aging population continues to deepen,the number of the elderly population continues to increase,the rapidly expanding middle-aged and elderly groups and the challenges brought by lifestyle changes,not only directly affect the quality of life and happiness index of the elderly,but also affect the implementation of the "healthy China 2030" program outline.In the context of "healthy aging",we should pay enough attention to the relationship between intergenerational care and the health of the elderly.Based on the phenomenon of intergenerational care,which is very common in Chinese society,this paper studies how intergenerational care affects the health status of middle-aged and elderly groups,as well as the influence of intergenerational economic support and intergenerational emotional support on health status.In order to study and how to influence people's health care behavior,and examine how children intergenerational support the intermediary variables play a role,this article from the micro individual perspective,using the 2015 Chinese old people health survey(CHARLS)data,build the index of the elderly health weak indicators,and from urban and rural areas,gender,and way of living the three dimension describes the weakness degree of difference under different conditions,by comparison with multiple points of view,more comprehensive examines the differences in the elderly health status;On this basis,this paper used baseline regression to explore how intergenerational care affects the health of middle-aged and elderly and whether there is heterogeneity among different middle-aged and elderly groups.In addition,in order to avoid endogeneity caused by self-selection of samples,the robustness of the conclusion was further verified by the propensity score matching method.In addition,the mediating effect variables are added to further explore the action path of the influence of intergenerational care on the health status of the middle-aged and elderly,and the contribution of each mediating variable is calculated by decomposing the mediatingeffect supported by the intergenerational support through the KHB model.Finally,the research conclusions are summarized and relevant policy Suggestions are put forward,so that the research conclusions can serve the formulation and implementation of relevant public policies in China and respond more actively to the increasing care needs and severe aging health problems.The findings of this paper are as follows :(1)for the middle-aged and elderly group with grandchildren aged 16 and below,the intergenerational rearing behavior is beneficial to the physical and mental health of the middle-aged and elderly group.(2)with the increase of care time,the weakness of middle-aged and elderly people showed a decreasing and then increasing trend,that is,there was an inverted u-shaped relationship between the intensity of intergenerational care and the health of middle-aged and elderly people.(3)the effects of intergenerational care on the health status of middle-aged and elderly people show some heterogeneity,and intergenerational care is significantly beneficial to the health of the younger and older groups;At the same time,intergenerational care significantly promoted the physical and mental health of middle-aged and elderly women.In addition,the negative effect of intergenerational care on the degree of weakness is still different between urban and rural areas,and the health improvement effect of intergenerational care on the elderly in urban areas is more obvious than that in rural areas.(4)the analysis of the mediating effect shows that emotional and economic support for married children is the internal mechanism for the improvement of their health status.At the same time,the results of mechanism decomposition showed that the emotional support provided by children in intergenerational care had a greater effect on health improvement than financial support.Based on this,the following four Suggestions are put forward: first,formulate a flexible retirement postponement policy,optimize the allocation of resources for the "elderly population" and improve social welfare;Second,we will develop a subsidy system for intergenerational care to encourage the elderly to take intergenerational care.Third,the construction of intergenerational care and childcare services to ease the burden of intergenerational care for the elderly;Fourth,encourage and encourage children to give parents more intergenerational support.