Who moves?
For decades, demographers and gerontologists have investigated the senior migration. Researchers talked about “amenity moves” when healthy retirees head for places with gentler climates and lower costs of living, and “assistance moves” when those same people return, less healthy and more needy, to live near family.
They published articles about the so-called J-shaped curve.“It wasn’t until later that people began to ask, ‘What about the kids?’” said Michal Engelman, a University of Chicago gerontologist and an author of a new study that helps answer that question. “We had a hunch there was more to this story.”
Isn’t there always? Much of what we think we know about who lives where as people age — a key factor in this country, which plunks elder care responsibility so squarely on family shoulders — is simplistic or plain wrong.
How often, for instance, have you heard about our increasingly mobile society, often part of a lament about self-centered children abandoning the old folks at home? But mobility rates in the United States have declined among all age groups, in a nearly unbroken pattern, for 60 years.
“Although there may be good reasons to worry about the future of family care provided to elderly individuals, increased geographic mobility does not appear to be one of them,” the demographers Douglas Wolf and Charles Longino Jr. wrote in a much-noticed 2005 article in The Gerontologist.
Dr. Wolf examined more recent census data for me and pointed out that, post-recession, the decline has continued: The percentage of Americans who moved in the past year reached an all-time low (11.6 percent) in 2010. Ours is a decreasingly mobile society, geographically and otherwise.
In fact, a great majority of older Americans don’t relocate, and most live quite near family. In Dr. Engelman’s sample of about 8,000 people over age 69, drawn from three waves of the national Health and Retirement Study, 73 percent of those who lived more than 10 miles from their nearest child stayed at that distance over the four years the team investigated. Only 14 percent wound up living closer to a child.
And in most of these “proximity-enhancing moves,” it wasn’t frail snowbirds returning to chillier but more supportive locations.
“It’s way more likely to be children who move closer,” said Dr. Engelman, whose study appears in the journal Research on Aging. Among families who experienced “enhanced intergenerational proximity” — don’t you love the way academics write? — adult children were 1.6 times as likely to relocate closer to their parents as the parents were to move nearby.
A long list of factors influence these decisions, on both sides of the generational divide. For parents, their predictions about how likely they were to live another 10 years played a significant role, regardless of their actual health. Moving can involve financial and psychological costs, and “the probability of survival is part of a calculation people make,” Dr. Engelman said. “They’d have more time to offset those costs and enjoy the benefits” of closeness to children and grandchildren. But parents’ “anticipated longevity” played no significant role in children’s relocations.
Among seniors, women are more likely than men to move closer to children; divorced people and widows move closer more frequently than those with spouses. Black, Asian and Hispanic older adults are more likely to make proximity moves than white ones.
Having long-term care insurance — agents, sharpen your pencils — made parents less likely to move closer, apparently because “it shows potentially less need for family care,” Dr. Engelman hypothesized. “If they need more help, they’ll be able to get it.” Homeownership and long residence in a neighborhood also reduce proximity moving.
On the children’s side, unsurprisingly, proximity moves happen significantly more often when their parents report poor health. But providing help may not be their only reason, Dr. Engelman pointed out. “Having a relatively low income” — less than $35,000 a year — “makes them much more likely to move closer to parents.”
Perhaps it’s easier to pull up stakes when you aren’t earning much. Or perhaps the parents aren’t always the dependent parties. “In many ways, older people are also a resource, able to provide support and an anchor for the family,” said Dr. Engelman, who has a long interest in intergenerational relationships.
So, who moves? “These things are complicated,” she concluded. “Decisions arise from a whole lifetime of family relationships. But this does tell us that people think about this as a collective family decision. It’s not unilateral.”