Aging, Elder Care, and Multigenerational Households

The proportion of people aged 65 and older in the world's wealthier countries has tripled since 1950 and will continue rising for decades. Japan, Italy, Germany, and South Korea have the most aged populations on earth; by the 2030s more than a quarter of each country's population will be over 65. The United States, with higher fertility and more immigration, is aging more slowly, but will still reach roughly 21% over-65 by 2040 according to Census projections. Even many middle-income countries — China, Brazil, Thailand, Iran — are aging faster than the rich countries ever did, compressing into two or three decades a transition that took Europe a century.

This demographic shift has transformed family sociology. When average life expectancy was under 50, as in much of the world through the nineteenth century, multigenerational family life as we now describe it was rare because grandparents commonly died before grandchildren reached adulthood. Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost (1965) corrected persistent myths about 'the extended family of old'; most Western European households were in fact nuclear. What has changed is not so much household composition as the length of time family members share the planet. Americans today may know four or even five generations of their family; the average married couple spends more years caring for aging parents than for dependent children.

Sociologists of aging (Matilda White Riley, Glen Elder, Linda Waite, and others) developed the life-course perspective to capture the patterning of lives across time, cohort, and social context. The approach rejects a simple decline model of aging in favor of attention to historical period (the 1930s cohort experienced the Great Depression as children; the 1945 cohort came of age in postwar prosperity), cumulative advantage and disadvantage (early educational opportunities compound into health differences at 80), and the interweaving of individual lives with those of family members (linked lives).

The aging society poses challenges for every major institution: pension systems, healthcare, housing, labor markets, and families. Because families remain the primary providers of care even where strong public systems exist, family sociology is central to any understanding of how aging societies will cope. The specific distribution of care work — who does it, when, with what support, and at what cost — reveals the underlying moral economy of a society.