Caring for children with special healthcare needs and parent health in later life.

Guided by the life-course perspective and the stress process model, this study examines the long-term health associations of parent caregiving for children with special healthcare needs. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we linked retrospective caregiving histories from the 2017 and 2019 Life History Mail Survey to later-life health outcomes from the 2020 core survey. The analytic sample included 7003 participants (parent caregivers: n = 185; other caregivers: n = 1469; non-caregivers: n = 5349). We examined caregiving group membership and, among parent caregivers, six caregiving characteristics: multiple care, start and end age of caregiving, number of episodes, accumulated duration, and concurrent caregiving. Compared with non-caregivers, parent caregivers reported more functional limitations and more depressive symptoms in later life, whereas other caregivers differed from non-caregivers only on functional limitations. In caregiver-only comparisons, parent caregivers continued to report more depressive symptoms than other caregivers but no longer differed on functional or cognitive health. Parent caregivers also began caregiving earlier, ended later, and accumulated nearly three times the caregiving duration of other caregivers. Among parent caregivers, our exploratory analysis showed that a later caregiving start age was associated with better cognitive health, whereas a later end age was associated with more functional limitations. The findings indicate that depressive symptoms are a distinctive later-life correlate of parent caregiving, while functional and cognitive health may be dependent on caregiving timing. The study underscores the need for prospective longitudinal research and targeted long-term support for parent caregivers of children with special healthcare needs.