Interesting research published in The Telegraph (UK)
Increasing a person’s wage can cause a significant drop in the amount of time they spend helping their parents with household chores, errands and transport. For every ten per cent rise in their salary women will spend 36 per cent less time providing care and men will reduce their input by 18 per cent. Having a sibling or other person equipped to help out makes the effect even more severe. Olena Nizalova, of the Kiev Economics Institute, said her study on long-term care in America and Europe demonstrates that current global policies towards making care affordable are not compatible with each other. Providing care for the elderly is becoming an ever more difficult problem because birth rates are declining and people are living longer and reaching retirement in record numbers.
Here’s the key bit
Economists have suggested that the burden could be reduced by encouraging more women to take jobs and raising the retirement age in order to increase the workforce, and urging the families and friends of the elderly to provide more informal care themselves. But the findings from the new study indicate that earning more money would be likely to lower rather than raise the amount of time people spend looking after their elderly relatives. Involving an elderly person’s wider family and friends in their care could also cause their children to more dramatically reduce the amount of time they spend helping out as their earnings rise.
Confirmation of the saying “More family, less money – more money, less family”