Multigenerational social support in the face of the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

Research documents high levels of instrumental, financial, and expressive support exchanges within multigenerational families in the 21st century. The COVID‐19 pandemic poses unique challenges to support exchanges between the generations; however, the pandemic may provide opportunities for greater solidarity within families. In this review, we draw from theoretical perspectives that have been used to study family relationships to understand the implications of the pandemic for multigenerational families: the life course perspective, the intergenerational solidarity model, and rational choice/social exchange theory. We review literature on multigenerational relationships in the United States and discuss how established social support patterns and processes may be altered by the COVID‐19 pandemic. We reflect on how the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on multigenerational relationships may vary by gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Finally, we provide directions for future researchers to pursue in order to understand the lasting impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on multigenerational ties.

Lived experiences of older adults during the first COVID-19 lockdown: A qualitative study

“…In line with our findings, a study conducted with older adults living in nursing homes identified several tensions experienced by participants' and resulting in a feeling of being "disconnected in a shrinking world" [35]. Next, our findings on relational ambivalence at an intergenerational level (the youth as both "friends" and "enemies" of the elderly) extends evidence from previous studies [36][37][38], and suggest that, compared to pre-pandemic conditions, a wider gap may emerge between young and old. This may have repercussions on exclusion and discrimination of older adults, and on intergenerational contrasts and tensions.…”

The COVID-19 pandemic and changes in the level of contact between older parents and their non-coresident children: A European study

“…Prior to the pandemic, studies demonstrated that the majority of older adults in Europe had at least weekly contact with their children living outside the parental home (Cooney & Dykstra 2013;Steinbach et al 2020), but because of the physical distancing measures that isolated older adults from their children, one could expect that the level of intergenerational interaction has generally decreased during the pandemic. However, this study also develops the alternative hypothesis that, rather than being a threat to parent-child ties, older adults had more frequent contact with their non-coresident children during the pandemic than before, fuelled by a shift towards more non-physical modes of communication (e.g., telephone and video calls, text messages, …) between generations (Arpino et al 2020a), intensified patterns of instrumental support requiring in-person contact (Gilligan et al 2020) and concerns over each other's health and wellbeing (Giovanis & Ozdamar 2020).…”

“…Physical distancing measures to curtail the spread of the virus may have weakened family relations, because they restricted older adults' opportunities to meet their non-coresident children in person. In addition, older adults might have been fearful of seeing their children, given their high risk profile (Settersten et al 2020) and adult children, in their turn, may also have preferred to minimize physical contact with their older parents to protect them from infection (Gilligan et al 2020). Also, mandated school and childcare closures meant that adult children experienced increased time demands at home (Del Boca et al 2020), potentially leaving less time to spend with their older parents.…”

“…Second, in the COVID-19 era, grocery shopping, accessing healthcare, and receiving home care all posed new risks to older adults' health (Henning-Smith 2020). Consequently, older parents -and the oldest old in particularlikely experienced a greater need to rely on their adult children for instrumental support (Gilligan et al 2020), which requires in-person contact (Cooley & Dykstra 2013). Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic may not only have intensified the flows of support from adult children to their older parents, downward support patterns may have increased too (Gilligan et al 2020).…”

Household Coping Strategies During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chile

“…Intergenerational coresidence has been found to facilitate flows of support among family members during the current crisis in many other countries. In the United States, for example, the coresidence of young adults with their older parents increased as a result of the pandemic owing to the sharing of resources as a means of reducing expenditure ( Gilligan et al, 2020 ). In Spain, although no evidence of an increase in intergenerational coresidence has been found, probably because the arrangement is already relatively widespread, the willingness of older generations to provide financial and care assistance to younger generations did increase ( Ayuso et al, 2020 ).…”