Hybrid Format
Parental support to adult children: Inequalities within and between families
Matthijs Kalmijn, The Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)
Online or at Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, April 09, 2024
Matthijs Kalmijn © Matthijs Kalmijn, Irene van Kessel | Fotografie © 2023
As part of the Suessmilch Lecture series, Matthijs Kalmijn from the Matthijs Kalmijn will speak about "Parental support to adult children".
The event begins at 3 pm CET on April 9, 2024.
Abstract
As a result of increasing insecurity in the labor market, the erosion of welfare states, and changes in the demographic life course, children experience increasing uncertainty in their adult lives. In response to these trends, the dependence of adult children on their parents is believed to have become more widespread, more intense, and more prolonged. Authors speak of ‘helicopter parents’ and a ‘new adulthood’, with strong interdependencies between generations that extend into the entire life courses of children. The current study uses a new large-scale national survey from the Netherlands on intergenerational relations (Kalmijn et al. 2018) to study how parents allocate support to their adult, independently living children. Three dominant explanations for variations in support are tested: the role of children’s needs (demand-side explanations), the role of parent’s resources (supply-side explanations), and the role of family structure. Elaborate measures are available from the survey and matched register data to test these explanations. Moreover, due to an oversample of children from non-intact families, considerable variation exists in the types of children and families, including divorced families, stepfamilies, and serial family forms. Variations are studied both between and within families.
REFERENCES
Kalmijn, Matthijs, K. Ivanova, R. van Gaalen, S. G. de Leeuw, K. van Houdt, F. van Spijker and M. Hornstra. 2018. "A Multi-Actor Study of Adult Children and Their Parents in Complex Families: Design and Content of the Okin Survey." European Sociological Review 34(4):452-70. doi: 10.1093/esr/jcy016.
About the Speaker
Matthijs Kalmijn (Ph.D., 1991, UCLA) is a demographer specializing in research on family, life course, marriage and divorce, intergenerational relations, inequality, and migration/ethnicity. Kalmijn has (co-)coordinated several large-scale social surveys in the Netherlands, including the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS), the Netherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (NELLS), and more recently, the multi-actor survey Parents and Children in the Netherlands (OKiN). Kalmijn is senior researcher at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) and professor at the University of Groningen. He was inaugurated to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).