Eldercare Demands and Time Theft: Integrating Family-to-Work Conflict and Spillover–Crossover Perspectives

Adapting the spillover–crossover model to the context of eldercare, we employed a 5-week weekly diary method in a sample of 82 Chinese dual-earner heterosexual couples to examine the relationships between family eldercare demands, family-to-work conflict, and time theft. Results from multilevel path modeling analyses found that family eldercare demands (as a shared/common stressor) were positively related to each partner’s family-to-work conflict and that the weekly family-to-work conflict of each partner was positively related. Furthermore, family eldercare demands were positively related to each partner’s time theft at the week level, and this relationship was mediated by weekly family-to-work conflict. Thus, this is one of the first studies to show that family eldercare demands can explain the interindividual crossover of family-to-work conflict between partners at the week level and this can spill over intraindividually to impact time theft at work. These findings enhance the field’s understanding of the process by which eldercare demands relate to time theft among dual-earner couples within a focused temporal framework.