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In response to the dominant narrative that informal care episodes become increasingly heavy over time, this study empirically identifies distinct informal care trajectories in terms of developments in care demands (care receivers’ health), intensity (number of hours) and complexity (number and type of tasks) over the course of a care episode. Latent class analysis on 5,595 informal care episodes among 2,884 Dutch carers identified a ‘stable trajectory’ (41 per cent) and ‘decrease trajectory’ (22 per cent) apart from an ‘increase trajectory’ (37 per cent). The trajectories were related to care receivers’ characteristics (age), carers’ difficulty of saying ‘no’ (relationship and obligation) and changes in the care context (living situation).
Applying fixed-effects models using Waves 2 to 13 (2007–19) of the German Labour Market and Social Security panel study, we examine how unpaid caring changes labour supply and if monthly monetary transfers from the care recipient to the carer motivate a reduction in labour supply. We find that for both women and men, starting high-intensity caring increased the likelihood of becoming non-employed. Women were already likely to reduce working hours when starting non-intensive caring, whereas only intensive caring reduced working hours for men. Receiving low monetary transfers was a higher motivation to become non-employed for men, and receiving low monetary transfers only reduced working hours for women.
This study sets out to identify and describe informal care trajectories over the lifecourse in the Netherlands, and evaluate theoretical ideas on informal care trajectories. We conduct latent profile analysis on a sample of 949 respondents who retrospectively reported on all informal care episodes they had ever experienced, based on the number of episodes, age at first caring episode, duration and overlap. We identified four informal care trajectories – the one-time partner, mid-aged parental, serial and lifelong care trajectories – and assessed their differences in felt obligation, intensity and task complexity. The theoretical ideas of Keating and colleagues find support in our empirical evidence.
