Caregiving: Assisting Parents and In-laws: Gender, Type of Assistance and Couples' Employment

For this paper researchers used data from the 1995 National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States. This study highlighted the importance of looking at both the gender and whether a caregiver and their spouse are both employed. The authors report that research has shown that women spend more time providing care than men. They expanded on this research by looking at different types of support, such as financial or how much time is provided to both parents and in-laws. They also looked at the couples joint employment status and how many hours they work and how their employment status affected their level of caregiving (Chesley & Poppie, 2009).

The authors found the following:

• only partial support that women provide more help to relatives than men; 
• women provided more emotional support to both parents and in-laws;
• providing more emotional support may lead to more psychological distress for women; 
• less time spent caring for in-laws compared to time spent caring for parents; 
• women spent more time than men providing emotional support to in-laws; 
• no difference between women or men and the time spent providing unpaid task assistance to in-laws; 
• more support is provided if only one partner is employed; 
• less support is provided in dual-earner couples; 
• no support of gender differences in financial assistance provided to parents or in-laws; 
• work hours affected the amount of financial assistance provided; 
• having an employed partner reduces the amount of financial assistance provided;
• single earners appear to be able to advocate more financial assistance for their parents; 
• and the average financial contribution to parents was $9.72 and for in-laws was $4.78. 

The researchers admit several limitations to their study. It only included couples, so their findings can not be generalized to singles. They also do not know the gender or marital status of the parent or in-laws being helped. Also, they could not determine when there were no living in-laws, however, they did not feel this influenced in-law estimates substantially.

So, women still provide more care than men, especially with emotional support to both their parents and in-laws. In-laws get less help from their daughter-in-laws and son-in-laws. If only one partner is employed more help is provided. This makes sense. One partner is at home cooking, cleaning and doing the laundry, so this frees up time to care for your parents. If both partners work then they both have equal say in how much financial assistance is provided to aging in-laws and parents. If only one partner is working then they have more control over how much of their families funds go to help their parents. However, the financial contribution still seems very small to me to both parents and in-laws.


Chesley, N., & Poppie, K. (2009). Assisting parents and in-laws: Gender, type of Assistance, and couples’ employment. Journal of Marriage and Family, 71(2), 247-262.