Is There a Trade-off Between Parent Care and Self-care?

Kanika Arora () and Douglas Wolf

Demography, 2014, vol. 51, issue 4, 1270 pages

Abstract: Caregiving for family members is often described as a 36-hour day. Previous literature has suggested that family caregivers have little time to attend to their own health needs, such as participating in leisure-time physical activity. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we analyze whether time-allocation decisions reflect a conflict between time devoted to informal care and time devoted to self-health promotion through physical activity. The empirical model is a system of four correlated equations, wherein the dependent variables are hours spent caregiving, frequency of moderate and vigorous physical activity, and hours spent in paid work. Results from joint estimation of the four equations indicate limited evidence of a competition between time spent in caregiving and frequency of physical activity. Parental factors that increase allocation of care time to parents do not comprehensively induce reductions in the frequency of any type of physical activity, or in hours of work, among either men or women. Copyright Population Association of America 2014

Keywords: Informal caregiving; Time use; Physical activity; Labor force participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s13524-014-0309-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:demogr:v:51:y:2014:i:4:p:1251-1270

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13524

DOI: 10.1007/s13524-014-0309-6

Access Statistics for this article

Demography is currently edited by John D. Iceland, Stephen A. Matthews and Jenny Van Hook

More articles in Demography from Springer, Population Association of America (PAA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().