Projects...

Family Structure and Adult Children's Location Decisions 

joint with Helena Holmlund and Thomas Siedler

Award/Grant Description:

Geographic distance between adult children and their elderly parents is an important determinant for the well-being of both generations and influences the frequency of contact between parents and children trough visits and phone calls, helping behaviour, mutual exchange of social and instrumental support and parental care decisions. This research looks at various determinants of adult children’s and their parents’ geographic proximity. The principal aim is to provide new evidence on the effect of family size on adult children’s location decisions. The more detailed objectives of the research are to provide answers to the following questions: Do adult children from larger families live further away from their parents’ residence because they have more siblings to share parental visits, intergenerational support and parental care decisions with? How does geographic location of adult children and their parents change over the life-cycle? Are there differences in child-parent geographic proximity between daughters and sons, and for siblings of different birth order? Do adult siblings who left their parents’ home live close to each other?

We thank the Economic & Social Research Council for financial support under grant RES-000-22-2684.

For a non-technical summary click here.