A Relational Demographic Perspective on Later-Life Caregiving: Evidence from Canada

Fabio Robibaro , University of Toronto
Aasli Abdi Nur, University of Oxford
Monica Alexander, University of Toronto
Ridhi Kashyap, Oxford University

In Canada, one in four people aged 15 and older are caregivers. Within the next 50 years, the number of Canadians aged 85 and over is expected to triple to over 4.3 million. These demographic shifts disproportionately affect families, with women bearing the majority of informal, unpaid caregiving responsibilities. Recent literature has focused on care arrangements in increasingly aging populations, with less attention given to changes in the availability of care over the life course. This paper addresses this gap by integrating detailed caregiving data from the Canadian General Social Survey within a multi-state, relational demographic framework to provide a population perspective on caregiving in later life. We generate caregiving life expectancies by age, sex, and kin relationship, then extend these to population-level estimates. Our relational approach reveals gendered patterns of caregiving intensity across the life course, including simultaneous care provision for parents and spouses in later life.

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 Presented in Session 104. Flash Session Caregiving Patterns, Determinants and Consequences