In Europe, on average, three times as many adult children occasionally help their parents with the housekeeping than do provide regular physical care. This is not surprising, considering the great differences between these two types of support. Care follows needs, whereas help tends to be given sporadically when one has the opportunity. In the familial welfare states in Southern Europe, where little professional support is available, provision of care by children is more likely-whereas parents in the north are more likely to receive help in the household or in dealing with the authorities. Logistic multi-level models enable these differences to be traced back to the availability of social and health services in the individual countries. There is a 'crowding in' of the help children give their parents, but a 'crowding out' of physical care. Overall, the results based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement data thus support the specialization hypothesis: professional providers take over the medically demanding and regular physical care, whereas the family is more likely to provide the less demanding, spontaneous help. Everyone does what they do best. The overall care of older people thus tends to be assured both quantitatively and qualitatively by well-developed service systems.

As a consequence of increased life expectancies and the overall improved health status of elderly people in industrialized countries, grandparents and grandchildren are now sharing a longer period of their lives together, from which they can both actively benefit. In addition, grandparents help their children by looking after their grandchildren and are consequently an important service provider in the domain of childcare, especially for mothers active in the labour market. The analyses, which are based on the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland), show significant country differences in the occurrence and intensity of grandchild care in Europe: whereas grandparents in southern Europe engage less often but more intensively in childcare, grandchild care is provided more often but much less intensively in northern Europe. Multilevel logistic regression models show that country-specific differences are associated with welfare state arrangements and, specifically, with public investments in childcare infrastructures. Public investments ‘crowd in’ grandparental willingness to engage in childcare but ‘crowd out’ the intensity of this intergenerational time transfer. Family and state thus complement one another, with grandparents taking over sporadic, less time-intensive care while public institutions provide regular, time-consuming childcare services.

Dependent older people are predominantly cared for by family members, mostly partners and children, but not every parent in need is cared for by a child, and intergenerational care varies widely across Europe. Previous studies have used care regimes to explain these differences, but because of the lack of large comparative surveys, the prevalence of intergenerational care has rarely been related directly to the institutional and cultural context, including state care provision, legal obligations between family members, and societal opinion about the role of the state in elderly care. This paper reports an analysis of variations in intergenerational care among European countries and the reasons for these differences using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe for Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Results from logistic multilevel models show that care by children is influenced by the individual characteristics of both parents and children, and by family structures, welfare-state institutions and cultural norms. Intergenerational care is more prevalent in southern and central European countries, where children are legally obligated to support parents in need, and care is perceived as a responsibility of the family, whereas in northern Europe, the wider availability of formal care services enable adult children, particularly daughters, have more choice about their activities and use of time.

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Elderly people with functional limitations are predominantly cared for by family members. Womenspouses and daughtersprovide most of this care work. In principle, gender inequality in intergenerational care may have three causes: first, daughters and sons have different resources to provide care; second, daughters and sons respond differently to the same resources; third, welfare state programmes and cultural norms affect daughters and sons differently. In this paper, we address the empirical question whether these three assumed causes are in fact responsible for gender differences in intergenerational care. The empirical analyses, based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), reveal that parents in need are in fact more likely to receive care from daughters than from sons. Daughters are more responsive to the needs of their parents than sons and respond differently to the same resources. Gender inequality is highest in countries with a high level of intergenerational care, high public spending on old-age cash-benefits, a low provision of professional care services, high family obligation norms and a high level of gendered division of labour. Welfare state programmes reduce or increase gender inequality in intergenerational care by reducing or increasing the engagement of daughters in intergenerational care. In general, care-giving by sons is hardly influenced by social care policies.