Does part-time employment reduce the conflict between work and inter-generational care?

LAKOMÝ, Martin and Martin KREIDL. Does part-time employment reduce the conflict between work and inter-generational care? In Poster na konferenci "European Population Conference 2014", Budapest, 25-28 June 2014. 2014.

Basic information

• Original name: Does part-time employment reduce the conflict between work and inter-generational care?
• Authors: LAKOMÝ, Martin and Martin KREIDL.
• Edition: Poster na konferenci "European Population Conference 2014", Budapest, 25-28 June 2014, 2014.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Field of Study: 50000 5. Social Sciences
• Country of publisher: Hungary
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• WWW: URL
• Organization unit: Faculty of Social Studies
• Keywords in English: active ageing, part-time employment, grandparental care, role conflict, SHARE
• Tags: International impact

Abstract

Policies supporting longer working careers may have several unintended consequences and may, for instance, negatively impact fertility and employment in the younger generations. Many parents seek grandparental help with childcare, which may be less often available if grandparents increase their labor market participation. While the (potential) impact of grandparent’s employment on grandparental caregiving has been examined repeatedly, the findings have been inconsistent so far. These inconsistencies may result from model misspecification and inadequate measurement of crucial variables. Furthermore, we hypothesize that there exist previously overlooked gender differences in this impact: women are generally more capable of combining paid work with childcare and are thus expected to experience role conflict to a lesser degree than men. We revisit the issue of the impact of employment attachment on grandparental caregiving and analyze SHARE data from 19 countries in both the overall population and specific sub-populations. We indeed find significant negative effects of employment on the intensity of intergenerational caregiving (but not so much on provision of any care). This effect, however, is observed among grandmothers only and only exists when grandmothers work full-time. Hence, we argue that active ageing policies and prolonged occupational careers do not inevitably result in reduced intergenerational care as long as enough part-time (self-)employment opportunities exist.

Links

• GA13-34958S, research and development project: Name: Přetížená role: prarodiče v době aktivního stárnutí

Investor: Czech Science Foundation