Elderly Parent Care Among Siblings
As a father of 7 children, including 6 BOYS, I often tell my wife (only half jokingly) to spend more time with our daughter, since she will undoubtedly be the one who will care for us through our golden years, while the boys will be off somewhere “conquering the world.”
It turns out, my tongue in cheek assessment wasn’t that far fetched at all, at least not according to a relatively recent study (2014) from Princeton University!
They argue that when it comes to that responsibility, women have a higher chance of stepping up and stepping in than their male siblings.
“Adult daughters provide twice as much care to their parents than sons,” says study author Angelina Grigoryeva, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Princeton. “Furthermore, the amount of care daughters provide is strongly associated with individual constraints they face, such as employment and competing caregiving responsibilities for children,” she says. For sons, though, the most important predictor of caregiving is the absence of additional helpers, such as another parent or a sister.
Read the interesting study here.