Indirect Reciprocity in Intergenerational Support in Japan

Intergenerational familial support is a fundamental aspect of family relationships. It has critical effects on the welfare of family members and reflects the distribution of social capital in the family. This study focuses on the elderly over 50 years old as providers of non-monetary support to their adult children, and assesses how their own parents’ support has affected their propensity to provide caregiving to their grown children. While directly reciprocal relationships in intergenerational support between parents and their children have been reported in the U.S. and Japan, we tested for the presence of indirect reciprocity from parents to children to grandchildren in Japan. The main research question is: Do the elderly who received more support from their parents tend to give more non-financial support to their adult children?
      Models are examined with data from the National Survey of Middle- and Old-aged People’s Life conducted in August 2010. The sample consists of 5,648 elderly people who were 50-84 years old with at least one child over 18 years old. To detect the indirect reciprocal association between from-parent-to-respondent support and from-respondent-to-children caregiving, some regression models are applied. The outcome variable is the number of types of non-monetary support that respondents gave to their first child within the year prior to the interview. The controls are socioeconomic status of the respondents and their first children, and the support exchanged between them.
     We found that receiving greater non-financial support from parents raised the propensity to offer caregiving to children, after controlling for other relevant factors. This result offers some rationale for the indirect reciprocity model of intergenerational support.