1,721,313 research outputs found
Minimal families: Childlessness and intergenerational transfers
No full textPrevious research has been wanting in two
respects : it has considered the childless as homogeneous, and it has
conceptualised them as a problem group. Policy-oriented research has
therefore tended to focus on the general consequences of childlessness on
the demand for public health and social care services as well as on the
institutional arrangements that might reduce the prevalence of childlessness.
The aim of this special issue is to redress this double deficit.
Firstly, we address the complexity of the social mechanisms that explain
the consequences of childlessness for individuals by taking into account
not only older people’s parenthood status, but also their gender, marital
history and motivations for having no child. Secondly, we conceptualise
childless older people not as a social problem but as a societal resource, by
focusing not on what people without children lack and need but on what
they provide to their families, to the younger generations and to society at
large.
Contributors: Kohli, M; Albertini, M.; Adloff, F.; Hurd, M.; Dykstra, P.; Wenger, G. C.
Linkages among adult family generations: evidence from comparative survey research
No full textIntergenerational family linkages (financial transfers and social support) are one of the key meeting grounds of kinship and social security. Their contribution is important for three pervasive crises of contemporary developed societies: (i) proliferation of life course risks due to the retrnchment of welfare states and the loss of stability of work and family careers; (ii) fertility; (iii) dependency in very old age. This chapter focuses on the material transfers between family generations. We show that intergenerational transfers in the family have remained wide-spread and substantive
On sub-Riemannian geodesic curvature in dimension three
Get PDFWe introduce a notion of geodesic curvature kζ for a smooth horizontal curve in a three-dimensional contact sub-Riemannian manifold, measuring how much a horizontal curve is far from being a geodesic. We show that the geodesic curvature appears as the first corrective term in the Taylor expansion of the sub-Riemannian distance between two points on a unit speed horizontal curve dSR2(ζ(t),ζ(t+ε))=ε2-kζ2(t)720ε6+o(ε6). The sub-Riemannian distance is not smooth on the diagonal; hence the result contains the existence of such an asymptotics. This can be seen as a higher-order differentiability property of the sub-Riemannian distance along smooth horizontal curves. It generalizes the previously known results on the Heisenberg group
Childlessness and intergenerational transfers: what is at stake ?
No full textIn this introductory article for the special issue on Childlessness and Intergenerational
Transfers, we first discuss the prior research literature and then overview the
presented contributions. Up to now, childless older adults have been treated for
the most part as both homogeneous and a problematic group. This does not do
justice to the different pathways to childlessness : there are those who actively
forgo having children, those who defer births so long that they involuntarily
become childless, and those who are not fecund or lack a partner. It also neglects
the changing social profile of the childless, e.g. the shift from less educated to more
highly-educated women. Most importantly, it fails to recognise what childless
older people give to others. The studies presented here aim to redress these two
deficits in previous research. They examine how the consequences of childlessness
are mediated by the pathways to and motivations for being childless and by factors
such as gender, education and marital history, and they also examine what
childless older adults provide to their families and to society at large. Such adults
establish strong linkages with next-of-kin relatives, invest in non-family networks,
and participate in voluntary and charitable activities, and broadly do so to a
greater extent than older people with surviving children
What Childless Older People Give: Is the generational link broken?
No full textSpecial issue on Minimal families: Childlessness and intergenerational transfers, edited by Martin KOHLI and Marco ALBERTINI, Published Online by Cambridge University Press 15 Oct 2009With the increase of childlessness in European societies, its consequences have become a matter of concern. Studies in this field, however, have concentrated on what childless people lack and need in terms of social, financial and moral support. In contrast, this article focuses on what childless people give to their families, friends, unrelated others and to society at large. Using 2004 data on social support and financial transfers given and received by people aged 50 or more years in ten European countries from the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the analyses show that the support networks of childless older people tend to be somewhat weaker than those of parents and that links with members of the younger generations in the family are stronger for parents than for those without children. The results also indicate, however, that the differences in transfer behaviour between parents and childless adults are small, and that the support networks of the childless are more diverse than those of parents, and characterised by stronger links with ascendants and lateral relatives and with non-relatives. Moreover, people without children tend to be more intensely involved in charities and comparable organisations
Intergenerational transfers of time and money in European families: Common patterns – different regimes?
No full textThe ‘generational contract’ is the most important and also the most contentious dimension
of contemporary welfare systems. Much of the debate on how to reform it is still truncated,
however, by focusing on its public dimension only, especially on pensions and health-care provisions.
For a full account, the transfer of resources between adult generations in the family needs to be
included as well. So far, research on family transfers has almost exclusively been limited to singlecountry
studies. In this article, we present a comparative study of financial transfers and social
support in ten Western European countries based on the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement
in Europe (SHARE) conducted in 2004. Our results confirm, at the European level, the existence of
a common transfer pattern. There is a net downward flow from the older to the younger generations,
both by inter vivos financial transfers and by social support. Transfers from the elderly parents to
their children are much more frequent and also usually much more intense than those in the opposite
direction. The positive balance decreases with age but even those over the age of 70 clearly
remain net givers. Our results also demonstrate that country-specific transfer patterns follow the
typology of welfare regimes. Transfers from parents to children are less frequent but more intense in
the Southern European countries than in the Nordic ones, with the Continental European countries
being somewhere in between the two. This welfare regime effect still holds after controlling for the
most relevant characteristics of the parents
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