# Children's Help to Aging Parents in the Face of Health and Economic Challenges from the COVID-19 Pandemic

> **NIH NIH R03** · SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $88,297

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Older Americans face unique challenges to their health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Older
adults and those with chronic health conditions are particularly vulnerable to severe complications from the
disease, and the need for physical distancing amplifies the impact of the virus by limiting access to support
systems. Threats to health and economic well-being posed by COVID-19 are even more severe for older
Americans who are poor, less-educated, and non-White because they tend to have poorer health and greater
exposure to the virus relative to their respective counterparts. Help from family, including time spent in running
errands and hands-on caregiving, money, and shared housing, is likely to be crucial for older adults facing health
and economic challenges to endure and maintain well-being. The pandemic only increases this need, just as
required physical distancing also affects the ability to receive hands-on care, whether related to the virus or not,
and help with household tasks that approximately 11 million Americans aged 65 and older receive from
caregivers. Variation across families in the need for and ability to provide help is magnified by the fact that health
and economic risks are correlated within families. Exposure to the consequences of the virus is also correlated
across families because families tend to live near one another, especially non-White and less-educated families.
The proposed project will use new data from the Health and Retirement Study including the new COVID-19
Module to address three Specific Aims: (1) how health, access to health care, and economic well-being of older
adults changed with the onset and progression of the pandemic; (2) whether adult children’s transfers of time,
money, and coresidence responded to the pandemic-related challenges older adults faced; and (3) whether
proximity of families improved or detracted from responses to the pandemic-related challenges of older adults.
In each of these aims, we estimate differences across socioeconomic status, race-ethnicity, and across
geographic areas that differed in the severity of the pandemic. We attempt to estimate causal effects of the
impact of the virus on the well-being of older adults and on family response to changes in well-being using a
combination of subjective assessments elicited from respondents and analytic strategies that exploit variation in
the severity of the virus across geography and time, in state-level policy responses, and in individuals’
vulnerability to the virus based on their preexisting health conditions. The results will provide a comprehensive
understanding of how the health and economic conditions of older Americans changed during the pandemic and
how these challenges that older Americans faced rippled across family members, both coresidential and non-
coresidential. More broadly, the results will characterize the strength of the family safety net and disparities in it
across socioeconomic status...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10287956
- **Project number:** 1R03AG073799-01
- **Recipient organization:** SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Emily Wiemers
- **Activity code:** R03 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $88,297
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-09-15 → 2023-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10287956

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10287956, Children's Help to Aging Parents in the Face of Health and Economic Challenges from the COVID-19 Pandemic (1R03AG073799-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10287956. Licensed CC0.

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