Most elderly care continues to be delivered informally within families. Yet we still lack a thorough understanding of how care responsibilities are shared across both family ties and generations. We explore the gender dimension of caregiving in the distribution of elderly care between couple members (care provided to parents and parents-in-law and to children or grandchildren) and its associations with siblings' sex composition in a range of European countries. Using SHARE data and multinomial multilevel models, we test how responsibility for elderly care is shared across children and mediated by their partners and their siblings' sex composition as well as how it is combined with other downward care responsibilities, towards children and grandchildren. Results confirm the very gendered nature of elderly care. But who do men shift elderly care responsibilities to? We find that elderly care is more likely shifted to sisters than brothers, especially when caregiving becomes intense. We also find that the lower contribution by sons does not seem to prompt transfers of care responsibilities to their female partners within couples. Finally, although upward and downward caring responsibilities might compete, we find that individuals who are more inclined to provide care tend to do so in both directions.

The article aims to understand how governments across Europe have modified the regulation of the delivery of cash‐for‐care schemes (CfCs) to dependent older people since the beginning of the century. In our terminology, the regulation of the CfCs delivery defines the norms, rules, and practices that public actors adopt to manage how beneficiaries can use the benefits. To discuss the regulation of CfCs delivery, we employ an original framework that take three analytical dimensions into account: the degrees of freedom in benefits' utilization (“CfCs utilization” dimension), the provision of information/orientation/advices/counselling to older people and families (“professional support” dimension), and the relationship between the delivery of CfCs and the delivery of the other publicly funded long‐term care inputs (“care system” dimension). The analysis adopts a comparative perspective, looking at six countries—Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and England. Among various findings, the main one consists in showing that there has been a shared and increased interest in consolidating the regulation of CfCs delivery. This trend has been mostly directed towards the new policy aim of strengthening the professional support, a goal underestimated in the past, when this dimension was not a major topic of both debate and practice concerning CfCs across Europe.

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This article investigates whether a prolonged absence from the workforce after the birth of the first child is associated with mothers having a lower retirement income and whether cross-national variations in family policy and pension systems moderate the relationship between work interruptions and retirement incomes in 10 European countries. The analysis, based on five waves of SHARE data, indicates that the longer a mother abstains from work after the birth of her first child, the lower her retirement income is. However, the association is negligible in countries where mothers are historically supported by a comprehensive welfare system, namely Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. The findings indicate that generous work–family reconciliation policies and a universally oriented pensions system are most effective in minimising long-term motherhood income penalties when they are jointly present, pointing to the importance of policy packages that combine active and passive measures to achieve dual decommodification.

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