Digital help and administration of older parents’ lives: the emergence of a fourth shift in Norwegian families

As the population age and services become digitalised, families are taking on new, often invisible, forms of work. This article examines ‘digital help’, i.e., the assistance adult children provide to older parents in navigating digitally mediated services and everyday technologies in Norway – a highly digitalised welfare state where most public and private services are digital-by-default. Drawing on semi-structured interviews (n = 34) with employed adult children holding caregiving responsibilities, we ask: What kinds of digital help do adult children provide for their parents, and what consequences of digitalisation do they experience, both in their parents’ lives and in their own care practices? Theoretically, we introduce and explore the concept of a fourth shift, extending on Arlie Hochschild’s shift-terminology employed in work-family studies, to conceptualise the administration and digital help that adult children in employment provide for their older parents and expand studies of care and work life in light of an ageing population. Empirically, we show how digitalisation paradoxically adds to family care by redistributing cognitive and coordination work onto kin, producing new responsibilities and time pressure. By identifying digital help as a distinct form of unpaid labour, the article reframes how digitalised service provision reshapes care infrastructure and intergenerational obligations.