Aging Parents and Adult Children’s Living Arrangements

My research on how families shape outcomes has not yet focused on aging, but in my personal life, aging is an everyday reality. Both my parents have dementia now. My dad's cognitive deficits used to be minor enough that he could take care of my mom, but recently his neurologist concluded that his own dementia had progressed enough that he can no longer be trusted to even take care of himself. That’s why I found myself resonating with the story that Mary Beth Ofstedal, BoRin Kim, Jersey Liang, Xiao Xu, and James Raymo told using 1998-2018 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data in a recently published article. The HRS followed the same people over time, so the researchers were able to determine what happens to the living arrangements of adult children and their parents as the parents go from being old (65+) to oldest old (85+). Parents in their study who were at least 65 years old in 1998 were at least age 85 in 2018. 

A key reason that the term “oldest old” was coined is that 65 is the new 45. Defining elderly as 65+ includes a lot people without serious health conditions, but having multiple chronic health conditions is the norm among the oldest old. In 1998, the first year of this study, my 2-year-old stayed with my retired parents when we took his 5-year-old brother to Scotland. Even though my parents were older at the time, they were still providing care. Over the years covered by the study, they became oldest old. Dementia is only one of many health conditions that can turn elderly parents from caregivers into care receivers.

Without reading Ofstedal et al.’s research, I would have guessed that parents’ health status would be the key predictor of whether their children lived far away, nearby, or with their elderly parents. In fact, parental health status is not significantly associated with adult children's living arrangements.

Their findings resonate with my experience anyway. They discovered that when either children or elderly parents have low income/assets, coresidence becomes more likely and nearby residence becomes less likely. In 2023, when my sister and I figured out that our mom’s dementia was preventing her from following through on a host of doctor’s recommendations (from insomnia treatment to physical therapy and more), neither of us moved in. Instead, I bought a house about 10 minutes away. One reason we didn’t move in was that my parents’ welcome extended to us, but not to our two dogs and two cats. As this study illustrates, we didn’t have to choose between our pets and my parents because we were able to buy a house nearby. Resources enabled our choices; lack of resources would have narrowed those choices. 

The study also finds that higher education of parents and children is associated with distant residence. Until recently, I had been living over 700 miles from my parents even before getting a Global Talent Visa that enabled our family to move to the United Kingdom so I could work on couples-focused behavior change strategies for health intervention research. My education had situated me in a job where I could be seconded to a UK university for fun research—far away from my parents.

Overall, the biggest change Ofstedal and her team observed during the study period as parents aged is that the probability of distant residence declined (from 72% to 64%). The probability of coresidence with children grew more than nearby residence. I look at those numbers in light of my own experience and understand that many parents and children live far apart, and that I was particularly likely to live far away because of my parents’ education and my own. A minority of children moved closer as their parents aged, but among those who did, those with more resources were more likely to live nearby than to move in with their parents.  

The researchers note that their work was guided by life course and rational choice frameworks. But it is important to consider that the choices that seem rationale as elderly parents grow older are often shaped by resources that allow both parents and children to implement their preferences. My family finds it painfully difficult to try to honor my parents’ autonomy while also keeping them safe. It would be far more painful if we did not have the resources to achieve either goal.

Laurie DeRose is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America, and Director of Research for the World Family Map Project.