The Impact of Sex Composition of Adult Children on Informal Social Support of Elderly in Iran

The objective of this paper is to examine the role female and male children play in the Iranian informal social support networks for elderly parents using Task-Specific (or Litwak's) theory. The data of the study has been obtained from two surveys including a sample of 527 people in 2006 and a sample of 400 people in 2011. In both sample, the people ages 60 or more. The analysis of binary logistic regression revealed that elderly parents expect highly from sons to help them when they confront with financial difficulties and further from daughters when they are illness. The examination of the effect of children birth order showed that elder sons have more significant role than younger brothers in supporting financially their parent, and, similarly, that elder daughters have more important role than younger sisters in nursing their parents. Also, the parents expect from the highly and academically educated children to help them financially and emotionally and from the low educated children to provide them instrumental supports such as transportation and nursing. In addition, the further analysis based on the data of survey in 2011 clarified that when a parent has no daughter, his/her son takes the responsibilities of all tasks, especially nursing, and that when he/she has no son , his/her spouse or siblings support him/her.