Effects of Gender Role and Wage Differential on Adult Children's Intergenerational Transfers to Their Elderly Mothers: Why Sons and Daughters Adopt Different Support-Giving Strategy?

Over recent decades, the number of Americans age 65 or older has grown as a proportion of the entire population. This unprecedented aging phenomenon poses that elderly-care issue will become even more important in the near future, and adult children will play an essential role to provide support to their older parents because most adults will have older living parents during their lifetime. Past studies have shown that gender norms play a significant role in the caregiving practice, yet few assess how wage differentials between both sexes may also affect adult children's intergenerational transfer behaviors. Do working adult children use monetary resources to substitute or supplement time contributions to their elderly mothers? How does gendered wage gap influence adult sons and daughters' support-giving decisions? Using the 1992 Health and Retirement Study, this study found that the differentials in transfer practices between adult daughters and sons are a by-product of gender norms and the gendered labor force structure. The multivariate analysis confirmed that adult sons with a higher wage rate tend to spend less time in the caregiving tasks, yet daughters' time contributions do not decline with their earning potentials. Well-paid daughters still spend longer hours than sons to fulfill elderly mothers' caregiving need. In other words, while adult sons use money to substitute for their time transfers, daughters view monetary and time resources as a complement to each other and use them simultaneously in the intergenerational transfer practice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]