Having a multiplex helper is essential for enhancing the well-being of older adults.

Recent findings show that 76% of older adults with at least one confidant and one caregiver have at least one multiplex helper—a person filling both roles—which has the potential to improve their overall health and happiness. Married or partnered seniors more often rely on their partner as a multiplex helper, while the unpartnered are more likely to depend on their adult children to serve multiple roles, especially for widowed older adults.

The University of Michigan study, published in the Journal of Gerontology, also suggests that older adults who do not have a multiplex helper may be at risk for worse well-being.

“As family composition is rapidly shifting in later adulthood, it is important to understand who helps older adults and in what ways under different family structures,” said demographer and sociologist Sarah Patterson, a research assistant professor at the Survey Research Center and an affiliate at the Population Studies Center, both at the U-M Institute for Social Research.

“In older ages, who can be relied on as a confidant to discuss important matters? Due to health limitations, who can be relied on as a caregiver to help with daily activities? And who can be relied on as both a confidant and a caregiver at the same time?”

Patterson and lead author Yongxin Shang of Cornell University explored the phenomenon of having the same person as both a confidant and a caregiver and showed its potential importance to the well-being of older adults. Most of the previous reports focused on either the social networks or the care networks of older adults, but very few considered the potential overlap between these two distinct types of networks.

“It’s important to understand who is in older adults’ networks and whether there is someone who can be relied on as both a discussion partner over important matters and a helper with care tasks,” Shang said. “There may be various types of “key players” who have important implications for the well-being of older adults, and our paper shows that multiplex helpers who can serve multiple roles are one type of such key players.”

Instead of just looking at how extensive an older adult’s support network is, it’s often more important to know who is helping with specific tasks and how that affects the person’s happiness and health as they age, the researchers say.

Patterson and Shang point out that although families of older adults are changing, the findings highlight how a partner and/or children continue to serve important roles in the lives of older adults.

“We were surprised that having other kin, like siblings, or non-kin, such as friends, as a multiplex helper was not associated with better well-being,” Shang said. “This finding may be because older adults prefer to rely on close family for caregiving, raising concerns about whether other kin and non-kin ties can be as supportive when close family ties become unavailable and what the possible alternatives are.”

The findings are based on the 2011 National Health and Aging Trends Study, an ongoing national panel study representative of the U.S. Medicare population ages 65 and older.

Researchers emphasized that no causal conclusions about multiplexity benefiting older adults can be drawn yet, as more research is needed. This includes studying how support patterns have evolved under increasing “kinlessness,” or lack of partners or children, and how reliance on distant relatives or nonrelatives for support affects well-being.

“One follow-up project aims to understand whether confidants are more likely to be mobilized as actual caregivers after the onset of care needs compared to other potential caregivers of older adults,” Shang said.