The family as a source of support for adult children's own family projects: European varieties.

This chapter examines how children in young adulthood and middle age are supported by their elderly parents in two potentially critical situations of their attempts to construct a family life of their own: parenthood and marital break-up. In the first situation, family support becomes critical, not only for coping with parenthood when it has occurred, but already for making it happen. In the second situation, family support becomes critical for mitigating the adverse consequences of an event which is increasingly frequent but still not adequately dealt with by the public framework of social protection. There are different degrees of family support across Europe, but what may be more relevant are differences in how families work; in other words, in the typical support strategies adopted by parents towards their children. Our analyses in this chapter address both of these issues by analysing data for Spain, France, Germany and Sweden. We found that parents respond to potential problems in the family life of their children by specific support strategies. When children have a small child of their own, parental help becomes much more prevalent, especially in terms of social support. Differences in support strategies among the countries are a matter of degree rather than of structure. For marital break-up, the activating effect of parental help is generally absent, but here we find clear country differences. In fact, Spain shows a strong activation of parental help for divorced children, which operates mostly through an increase in co-residence.