Intergenerational help and care among members of the family belong to the most important dimensions of contemporary welfare regimes. Recent research has indicated that a major part of caring responsibilities is placed on the middle-aged generation. The ‘pivot generation’ is expected to provide help to their adult children and grandchildren as well as to their ageing parents. It has been hypothesised that people helping their parents are discouraged from looking after their grandchildren because they experience lack of energy and time. Using data from the four waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), this paper analyses the effect of providing help to ageing parents on the likelihood and intensity of looking after grandchildren. It takes a four-generation perspective: grandchildren, children, parents and grandparents. The results show that the support of parents is not associated with less-frequent and less-intense care of grandchildren. On the contrary, a positive association between caring responsibilities has been observed. The highest tendency to care for grandchildren has been found for people regularly helping their parents. This effect holds after controlling for grandparents’ characteristics and country effects. It is suggested that caring responsibilities tend to accumulate rather than compete with one another and therefore could represent a potential risk of overburden for those who have a general tendency to care.

There is considerable debate about the effects of today's family structures on support arrangements for older people. Using representative data from The Netherlands, the study reported in this paper investigates which socio-demographic characteristics of adult children and their elderly parents, and which motivations of the adult children, correlate with children giving practical and social support to their parents. The findings indicate that the strongest socio-demographic correlates of a higher likelihood of giving support were: having few siblings, having a widowed parent without a new partner and, for practical support, a short geographical distance between the parent's and child's homes. Single mothers were more likely to receive support than mothers with partners, irrespective of whether their situation followed divorce or widowhood. Widowed fathers also received more support, but only with housework. A good parent-child relationship was the most important motivator for giving support, whereas subscribing to filial obligation norms was a much weaker motivator, especially for social support. Insofar as demographic and cultural changes in family structures predict a lower likelihood of support from children to elderly parents, this applies to practical support, and derives mainly from increased geographical separation distances and from the growing trend for parents to take new partners. Social support is unlikely to be affected by these changes if parents and children maintain good relationships.