Abstract Closer distance between parents and their children facilitates intergenerational contact and exchanges of support in later life. There are mixed narratives and evidence regarding the divergence—or convergence—of intergenerational proximity in aging societies. In this study, we examine trends and structural drivers of intergenerational distance and coresidence in a rapidly aging high-income society. We analyze register data from Finland, a country commonly characterized by weak family ties and a strong social welfare system. Using fine-scale geographic units and real-world navigation data to compute travel times, we examine the proximity of parents aged 60–69 to their children aged 18+ from 2003 to 2023, specifically analyzing trends in distance and coresidence between fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, and mothers and daughters. We then decompose the contribution of the population’s changing sociodemographic composition to changes in these outcomes. We find that while coresidence is low (10 percent with sons and 5 percent with daughters in 2023), more than half of Finnish parents live within 30 minutes by car to their nearest, non-coresident child, with parents living 5 minutes farther from their daughters than from their sons. From 2003 to 2023, the average distance to the nearest, non-coresident child increased by 10 percent to 19 percent or 3–4 minutes, with father-daughter distance showing the greatest increase. While this suggests that aging parents and adult children are living farther apart, we find that compositional changes—including the decline in the number of grandchildren, educational expansion, increased divorce rates among parents, as well as declining coresidence with sons—underlie this geographic divergence.
Afable et al. (Thu,) studied this question.