Is population aging mainly a concern for countries in the global North?

Population aging is often framed as a problem mainly affecting countries in the global North, where fertility and mortality are low. The European Commission Green Paper on Ageing (EC, 2021) aimed at identifying policies to tackle all aspects of this phenomenon. The document points up the changing proportion of working-age individuals in the population, echoing the view that measures like dependency ratios capture the main implications of population aging for societies.

However, contemporary demographic changes affect populations beyond dependency ratios. The Green Paper on Ageing itself also identifies “solidarity and responsibility between generationsˮ as an essential component of future policies to address population aging. This relates to the demographic concept of generational overlap, the degree to which members of different generations are alive at the same time (Grundy and Henretta, 2006). Overlapping generations are a universal phenomenon, but, with a few exceptions (de Lima, Tomás and Queiroz, 2015; Urdinola and Tobar, 2019), the phenomenon has been studied mainly in the global North.

Global trends of generational sandwiching

The Sandwich Generation refers to a particular type of generational overlap. The concept is not uniformly defined in the literature, making it difficult to study in an international comparative perspective. In a recent paper (Alburez, Zagheni and Mason, 2021), we use a standard demographic definition of generational “sandwichingˮ to study the phenomenon worldwide. Building on existing work (de Lima, Tomás and Queiroz, 2015), we consider individuals to be sandwiched if they have at least one young child (aged 15 years or less) and a parent or parent in-law who is expected to die within 5 years. This is exemplified in Figure 1, where the red segment in Ego’s lifeline represents the sandwiching period. Similarly, we consider individuals to be “grand-sandwichedˮ if they simultaneously have at least one young grandchild and a parent or parent-in-law who is expected to die within 5 years.

Armed with this definition, we estimated the prevalence of demographic (grand)sandwiching using a large number of demographic microsimulations based on demographic data from the United Nations’ 2019 revision of World Population Prospects. The simulated microdata allowed us to identify and quantify the periods in which parents around the world find themselves sandwiched between generations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first overview of the degree to which parents face simultaneous care-time demands from multiple generations around the world.

Perhaps the main finding is that the Sandwich Generation is less prevalent in the global North than in the global South, where parents are also more likely to spend longer periods in this state ‒ a surprising finding given that the life expectancy of parents is lower in the global South than in the North. Figure 2 exemplifies these trends by showing the number of years that a person born in 1970 can expect to spend (grand)sandwiched.

The study also provides novel evidence on the incidence of demographic sandwiching over the life course. Figure 3 shows the ages at which care-time demands are expected to peak in different regions, a period that Zannella et al. have called the “rush hour of lifeˮ (2019). The burden of generational (grand)sandwiching throughout their lives is greatest for individuals born in Sub-Saharan Africa and smallest for those born in Europe and North America. This contradicts the received wisdom that parents in the global North face the largest burden of sandwiching as a result of more widespread population aging. 

Implications of generational sandwiching

A continued focus on the generally wealthy countries of the global North has limited our understanding of the demographic dynamics that drive generational overlap on a planetary scale. Global studies allow us to situate phenomena in a comparative perspective. The finding that parents in the South face a heavier burden of sandwiching is especially relevant when we consider that they often also lack access to adequate systems of old-age support (such as pensions) and institutional childcare.

These trends have implications for the future of our societies. In our study, we project that people will face fewer demands to provide informal care to family members in the future. This may be a welcome development for over-burdened parents. At the same time, increased availability of grandparents can help to ease time constraints for parents in low- and middle-income countries. Generational overlap does not need to be a burden on individuals and families.

References

Alburez‐Gutierrez, D., Mason, C., and Zagheni, E. (2021). The “Sandwich Generation” Revisited: Global Demographic Drivers of Care Time Demands. Population and Development Review. Avanced publication.

Grundy, E. and Henretta, J.C. (2006). Between elderly parents and adult children: a new look at the intergenerational care provided by the ‘sandwich generation’. Ageing and Society 26(5):707–722. 

de Lima, E.E.C., Tomás, M.C., and Queiroz, B.L. (2015). The sandwich generation in Brazil: demographic determinants and implications. Revista Latinoamericana de Población 9(16):59–73. 

Urdinola, B. Piedad, and Jorge A. Tovar, eds. 2019. Time Use and Transfers in the Americas: Producing, Consuming, and Sharing Time Across Generations and Genders. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Zannella, M., Hammer, B., Prskawetz, A., and Sambt, J. (2019). A Quantitative Assessment of the Rush Hour of Life in Austria, Italy and Slovenia. European Journal of Population 35(4):751–776. 

EC (2021). Green Paper on Ageing. European Commission. 

The post Generational overlap places a heavy burden on parents in the global South appeared first on N-IUSSP.

Few people would question the saying that ‘no parent should have to bury a child.’ Child mortality has been low for so long in some parts of the world that the idea that children might die before their parents seems unnatural. Even in the Global North, however, things have not always been this way. For millennia, losing multiple children was the norm: in historical populations, parents usually lost about half of their children before they reached puberty (Volk and Atkinson 2013).

Conversely, in the Global South, despite remarkable progress in recent years, the death of a child, particularly a young one, continues to be a common life event for many parents.

A historic opportunity to reduce the gap between the Global South and North

In a recent study, my co-authors and I illustrate the huge differences in terms of child loss suffered by mothers depending on their place of birth, with the Global South being particularly affected (Alburez-Gutierrez, Kolk and Zagheni 2021). For example, women born in 1955 in Niger experienced 73 times more child deaths during their working ages than women of the same cohort in Sweden. Figure 1 exemplifies these differences on a world map by showing the number of children that an average woman aged 65 years in 2020 has lost over her life course. Recent studies on the prevalence of maternal bereavement have found a similar pattern, showing that 79% of mothers in Niger have lost at least one child, compared to less than 1% of mothers in Sweden (Smith-Greenaway and Trinitapoli 2020, Smith-Greenaway et al. 2021).

The risk that women in a population will lose a child at some point of their life depends on the prevailing levels of fertility and mortality. In general terms, high fertility increases the likelihood of losing a child because more women have several children and are thus exposed to a higher risk of losing at least one. The risks are even higher if mortality levels are also high. Knowledge of past, present, and future demographic developments is crucial for characterizing global trends in child loss.

An overall favourable trend

Some of our findings are encouraging. We anticipate that the experience of child death will be increasingly uncommon among younger cohorts of women all around the world. In addition, we project that the gaps between women in countries of the Global North and countries of the Global South, currently very large, will shrink in the coming decades. Yet, some inequalities will persist. For example, the death of a young child will continue to be a distressing reality for many women in sub-Saharan Africa.

Figure 2 exemplifies these trends by focusing on the related phenomenon of child survival. On average, women born in 1950 can expect four of their children to live longer than themselves, while for women born in 2000 the global average will be about two (left panel). These estimates are largely driven by fertility levels, which are expected to converge to about 2.1 children per woman by the end of the century. A complementary measure is the fraction of children who are expected to outlive their mothers. The right panel of Figure 2 shows a global convergence of this relative measure of child survival. The share of offspring who will outlive their mothers will increase globally from 89% for the 1950 cohort of women to almost 95% for the 2000 cohort. The difference between the region with the highest survival (Europe and North America) and the region with the lowest survival (sub-Saharan Africa) will decline over this period from 15 to just 5 percentage points.

These trends have an unexpected and previously unrecognized effect: women born in 1985 or later will be more likely to lose an adult child (when they themselves are aged 65 years or over) than to lose a young child (before their own 50th birthday), reversing a long-standing global trend. We anticipate that “child death” will increasingly come to mean the death of adult offspring.

A call for support to bereaved parents

The loss of a child is a traumatic event that affects the mental and physical health of parents in general and of mothers in particular. Studies have linked child loss to depression, poor self-rated health, increased alcohol consumption and intimate partner violence. These effects are particularly pronounced in countries where bereaved parents have no recourse to counselling or any other institutional form of support. Our finding that parents will increasingly face the death of an adult child requires particular attention. This trend is worrying if mothers (and fathers, even if they are not explicitly considered in our paper) plan their lives around the expectation that their adult children will survive to support them in their older years. The consequences may be especially severe following the death of an only child, a growing risk for women (and parents) in countries with very low fertility. The situation is particularly ominous in settings that lack adequate institutional systems of old-age support.

References

Alburez-Gutierrez D., Kolk M., Zagheni E. (2021). “Women’s experience of child death: A global demographic perspective.” Demography. Advanced Publication. DOI: 10.1215/00703370-9420770

Smith-Greenaway E., Alburez-Gutierrez D., Trinitapoli J., Zagheni E. (2021) “The Global Burden of Maternal Bereavement: Indicators of the Cumulative Prevalence of Child Loss.” BMJ Global Health, 6:e004837. DOI:bmjgh-2020-004837.

Smith-Greenaway E., Trinitapoli J. (2020). Maternal cumulative prevalence measures of child mortality show heavy burden in sub-Saharan Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117, 4027–4033.

Volk A.A., Atkinson J.A. (2013). Infant and child death in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34, 182–192.

The post Global trends in child loss: less and later appeared first on N-IUSSP.