Do richer people care less about their parents?

If you ever get a raise at work, maybe you should think twice before accepting it. A new study, as quoted in the Daily Telegraph, says that richer people are less likely to care for their aging parents than people with less money.

Olena Nizalova of the Kiev Economics Institute, studied nearly 2,800 Americans who had elderly parents, and found that with every increase in salary, the attention paid to aging parents would decrease. She discovered that for women, with every 10 per cent salary boost, they spent 36 per cent less time caring for their parents, and for men, the amount of care would fall by 18 per cent, according to the news source.

With millions of Baby Boomers set to retire over the coming years and decades, and with a significant number of them set to move into assisted living communities, the challenge that many elderly face of trying to pay for their care will not disappear any time soon. But the real challenge they may face is having their middle-age children taking less care of them , despite having more money than ever before.

According to the MetLife Mature Market Institute, the average cost for assisted living in the United States is about $3,500/mth, but it varies city-by-city, with some places, such as Boston, having an average of $4,600, and Jackson, Mississippi, with an average of only $1,600.