Analysis of intergenerational contact and solidarity patterns has generally focused on the family. However, the unprecedented co-existence of a high number of different generations raises the challenge to delve into how such patterns may develop inside and outside the family. To understand better intrafamilial and extrafamilial intergenerational contact and solidarity in Spain, three national surveys were initially studied using cross-tabulation tables and measures of association. Then, factor analysis and logistic regression of most recent data focused on explanatory variables behind two dimensions of intergenerational solidarity. Regarding intergenerational co-residence, the results point to a highly relevant difference between intrafamilial and extrafamilial habits. As regards regular, but non-residential, contact between the generations, two gaps have been identified. The first gap appears between family practices and non-family practices, with a significant and progressive reduction of the latter being detected. According to the second gap, while intergenerational contact drops outside the family, levels of intragenerational contact are comparable in both settings. In this context, patterns of associational and functional intergenerational solidarity towards older relatives and non-relatives have been identified, with age, distance, civil status and especially gender being the key explanatory variables. The paper argues that there is good reason to pay combined attention to both intrafamilial and extrafamilial forms of intergenerational contact and solidarity, something that has been done very little to date.

Older individuals who are in poor health or who lack spousal support are in many ways vulnerable in contemporary China. Declines in family size, combined with improvements in life expectancy and the out-migration of young adults from rural areas, have reduced the pool of potential care-givers for a growing number of older individuals. At the same time, state support for elderly people remains inadequate, further emphasising families’ role in care provision. This paper uses couple-level panel data from the 2012, 2014 and 2016 China Family Panel Studies to examine whether older couples with health-care or other needs receive help in the form of intergenerational co-residence. Multinomial logistic regressions are used to examine factors associated with the intergenerational solidarity framework from the older parents’ perspective that could motivate co-residence. Results show that when mothers report activity limitations or poor word recall at baseline, or when at least one parent has activity limitations in both waves, the probability of co-residence in both waves increases. Further, when both parents have depression at baseline, or when a parent loses a spouse, the probability of transitioning to co-residence increases. Findings suggest that adult children in present-day China do respond to parental needs by living together. Nevertheless, going forward, the state will likely have to play a greater role in old-age care provision.

The extent to which, and the reasons why, children help to care for their parents are examined in an extensive range of literature. Although care for parents essentially takes place in parent–child dyads, many of these studies acknowledge that the amount of care a child gives is generally the outcome of collective decisions in multiple-child families. However, to our knowledge, no research in Europe enhances our understanding of how sibling characteristics influence an individual child's care-giving. Using data for 14 European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, the present study relates pre-care-giving sibling characteristics to children's subsequent start of giving care. This longitudinal approach allows correction for the endogenous nature of time-changing predictors. The analysis demonstrates that daughters start to care more often when they have brothers instead of sisters. This pattern of gendered intergenerational care particularly applies to southern European countries. We also observe that both pre-care-giving parent–sibling frequency of contact and geographic distances predict children's care-giving transition strongly. Children who are closer to their parents than siblings in terms of contact and proximity have higher odds of care-taking. Finally, being the only child without a job enhances the start of care-giving as well. The results suggest that sibling characteristics are an important factor in explaining intergenerational care differences between children in Europe.

Proceeding population aging might fuel generational conflicts about the distribution of welfare state resources in the future, but the existing evidence on the extent of generational cleavages in attitudes towards the welfare state is mixed. We argue that these mixed findings are partially related to an underestimation of trade-offs on the level of individual preferences. Using novel data from a survey experiment conducted in eight Western European countries, we show that age-related self-interest is an important determinant of social policy preferences. When elderly respondents are confronted with hypothetical cutbacks in pensions, they are much less likely to support additional education spending. However, we also find evidence for a mediating effect of social trust: high-trusting elderly individuals are more likely to support education spending – contrary to their narrow self-interest – than low-trusting elderly.

The article analyses the norms of grandmothering in relation to cultural representations of active ageing. Based on interviews that were carried out with 20 mothers and 20 grandmothers of children under the age of ten, the article focuses on the way in which the current emphasis on activity influences ideas about how the roles of grandparent should be performed and how women relate to their own ageing. The analysis shows that being active represented a significant framework of the mothers’ notions and expectations associated with care provided by grandmothers, of grandmothers’ talk about their own grandparental role and how both generations of women interpret their own memories of their own grandmothers. Both the mothers and the grandmothers noted how the family role of grandmothers had changed compared to past generations of grandmothers. This change was framed by the idea of having an active lifestyle and this idea formed an important framework for the mothers’ expectations about what their role as grandmothers might be like in the future. This paper critically analyses those representations of the grandmother role and point out the emergence of new forms of conflicts and challenges, and the sense of ambivalence about traditional roles that result from the close association made between being active and the representation of grandmothering.

Recent long-term care (LTC) reforms in the Netherlands are illustrative of those taking place in countries with a universalistic LTC model based on extensive provision of state-supported services. They entail a shift from de-familialisation, in which widely available state-supported LTC services relieve family members from the obligations to care for relatives in need, to supported familialism, in which family involvement in care-giving is fostered through support and recognition for families in keeping up their caring responsibilities. Using data from four waves of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (N = 2,197), we show that between 2002 and 2014 the predicted probability that adult children provide occasional household support to impaired parents rose substantially. Daughters more often provided household support to parents than did sons, but no increase in the gender gap over time was found. We could not attribute the increase in children's provision of household support to drops in the use of state-supported household services. The finding that more and more adult children are stepping in to help their ageing parents fits a more general trend in the Netherlands of increasing interactions in intergenerational families.

Intergenerational help and care among members of the family belong to the most important dimensions of contemporary welfare regimes. Recent research has indicated that a major part of caring responsibilities is placed on the middle-aged generation. The ‘pivot generation’ is expected to provide help to their adult children and grandchildren as well as to their ageing parents. It has been hypothesised that people helping their parents are discouraged from looking after their grandchildren because they experience lack of energy and time. Using data from the four waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), this paper analyses the effect of providing help to ageing parents on the likelihood and intensity of looking after grandchildren. It takes a four-generation perspective: grandchildren, children, parents and grandparents. The results show that the support of parents is not associated with less-frequent and less-intense care of grandchildren. On the contrary, a positive association between caring responsibilities has been observed. The highest tendency to care for grandchildren has been found for people regularly helping their parents. This effect holds after controlling for grandparents’ characteristics and country effects. It is suggested that caring responsibilities tend to accumulate rather than compete with one another and therefore could represent a potential risk of overburden for those who have a general tendency to care.

Research suggests that adult children are less likely to provide care to community-dwelling parents when beds in residential care settings are more widely available. The underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Drawing on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) on 1,214 impaired parent–child dyads from 12 countries, we find that adult children are less likely to provide care in countries where beds in residential care settings are more widely available because (a) parents’ care needs are less severe in such countries (out-selection hypothesis) and (b) adult children and impaired parents are less likely to share a household in such countries (in-selection hypothesis). Finally (c), after taking these two factors into account, adult children remain less likely to provide care in countries where beds in residential care settings are more widely available (diffusion of responsibility hypothesis). Plausibly, being able to rely on residential care undermines adult children's sense of urgency to step in and provide care to their parents.

This paper examines how contextual (conversational) aspects and socially shared meanings might affect the participants' performance on a standardised memory test using the theoretical framework of social representations. A total of 97 members of centres for older adults located in Rome, Italy participated in a screening using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test. Prior to testing, a group of volunteers had organised a performance focused on events from the distant past, stimulating intergenerational reminiscence. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the first case, prior to administering the test, a psychotherapist talked to each participant about the performance, focusing on ageing and stressing the neutral aspects of its social representations, such as change and time. In the second case, performance was used to concentrate on positive aspects of the social representations of ageing, namely wisdom and experience. In line with the hypothesis, focusing on positive aspects of social representations of ageing (wisdom and experience) versus their neutral aspects (change and time) has resulted in improved performance on a standardised memory test. Practitioners (psychotherapists – experts in psycho-diagnostics) who administered the tests have been involved in the co-construction of the meaning of ageing, discussing a real-life situation: the common experience of intergenerational activity that involved the participants' memories of their urban environment.

This study challenges the persistent assumption behind research on intergenerational relationships, wondering: ‘can there be too much of a good thing’? The guiding hypothesis states that intergenerational solidarity, although beneficial for older parents' wellbeing at moderate levels, may be negatively associated with their individual sense of control at high levels. In contrast to previous studies, fixed-effects regression models on panel data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing control for selection in solidarity and changes in health. The analysis of 4,811 women and 3,847 men above the age of 50 also accounts for intergenerational conflict. Using multiple dimensions of intergenerational solidarity, our findings offer insight into the different roles of the various types of solidarity and can aid the design of formal and informal social support interventions.

Population ageing occurs in all industrialised societies and is the demographic phenomenon that currently gets the highest attention from scientists, policy makers and the general public. The main aim of this paper is to broaden our understanding of its societal consequences, such as ageism and intergenerational solidarity. Our study is based on the 2008 investigation of attitudes towards population ageing and older people in seven European countries of Schoenmaeckers et al. We replicate their analysis in a specific human subpopulation in which the process of population ageing started earlier and is much more advanced than in the general societies: the members of Catholic orders. The study compares the attitudes of 148 nuns and monks from three Bavarian monasteries to those of the western German general population using descriptive and multivariate analyses in the context of the debate around population ageing in Germany. We discuss the specific characteristics of order members that might influence their attitudes and also take a brief look at their views on possible political strategies to solve the problems connected with the demographic changes. Our results confirm the findings of Schoenmaeckers et al. and reveal that worldly and monastic populations show an identical basic pattern of a positive attitude towards older people while at the same time considering population ageing a worrisome development. However, order members evaluate older people's abilities and their role in society more positively. This result gives rise to the optimistic perspective that in an aged population the younger and older generations can build a well-functioning society.

Dependent older people are predominantly cared for by family members, mostly partners and children, but not every parent in need is cared for by a child, and intergenerational care varies widely across Europe. Previous studies have used care regimes to explain these differences, but because of the lack of large comparative surveys, the prevalence of intergenerational care has rarely been related directly to the institutional and cultural context, including state care provision, legal obligations between family members, and societal opinion about the role of the state in elderly care. This paper reports an analysis of variations in intergenerational care among European countries and the reasons for these differences using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe for Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Results from logistic multilevel models show that care by children is influenced by the individual characteristics of both parents and children, and by family structures, welfare-state institutions and cultural norms. Intergenerational care is more prevalent in southern and central European countries, where children are legally obligated to support parents in need, and care is perceived as a responsibility of the family, whereas in northern Europe, the wider availability of formal care services enable adult children, particularly daughters, have more choice about their activities and use of time.

This paper presents a critique of both the concept of age equality and of the limited scope it offers as a means for challenging old-age prejudice. The equality constructs that feature in anti-ageism initiatives and in current discourses on intergenerational equity have proved susceptible to political and ideological manipulation, which has led to the illegitimate dissociation of ageism from older age and promoted damaging notions of age equivalence. The consequence has been that old-age prejudice has been de-prioritised, and older people have been de-legitimised socially and as a welfare constituency. The corrective is best sought outside the confines of age equality frameworks, although legal remedies may play a useful role if human dignity is incorporated as an equality criterion. This paper also assesses other approaches to tackling old-age prejudice that avoid the constraints of equality constructs and engage more firmly with its roots. The notion of the ‘third age’ with new social roles merits reconsideration as an affordable alternative to current policies of work obligation and pension retrenchment. Radical interventions in the labour market in favour of older people may also be needed. Age activism and advocacy will increasingly influence policy on prejudice and well-being in older age, but changed emphases are needed, as from defensive strategies and the ideologies of generational interdependence and solidarity, towards the promotion of organisational, financial and social autonomy in older age.

The paper focuses on intergenerational support relations between grandparents and their grandchildren in Germany, and how they have changed from 1996 to 2002. The paper begins with a brief review of the literature on functional aspects of the grandparent-grandchild relationship, after which the research hypotheses about intergenerational support in the relationship are elaborated. Following a description of the data source, the German Ageing Survey, and its samples and measures, the evidence on the patterns of grandparents' provision and receipt of intergenerational support to and from their grandchildren are presented and compared with parent-child support patterns. The analysis also considers variations by age groups and birth cohorts and changes over time. The main empirical finding is that there was a greater likelihood of financial transfers to grandchildren in 2002 than six years earlier. Nevertheless, the grandparents' relationships with their grandchildren remained imbalanced or asymmetrical, at the older generation's expense. It was found that financial and instrumental support patterns between grandparents and grandchildren were best explained using an ‘intergenerational stake’ hypothesis rather than one of ‘intergenerational solidarity’; the latter is more consistent with parent-child support patterns.