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Children support for aging parents

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One interesting topic in Sociology of Family is about life cycle stages or phases of living for couples who established a family. But there is an embedded bias on this social construction of family life.

It assumes that everyone should marry, or that family is always composed of a father and a mother with biological children.

Incidentally, being unmarried often gets negative gendered remarks. I do not intend to explore on that issue now, neither to push nor negate the bases of such contention of a family, but I do recognize the fact there are modern constructs of family in terms of relationships and parental types–solo parent, same sex parent, distant parent, surrogate parent, and so on.

Traditionally, family formation follows this sequence–friendship and dating, courtship, engagement, and marriage or elopement; while family life starts with having a child, biological or sociological, then with more growing children raised by both parents. This is known as family of orientation according to its primary function.

The parent family subsequently starts to dissolve as the children get married, one after the other, to establish their own respective families–a type known as family of procreation–until only the parents are left behind.

This sequence of family events assumes that the couple grow old and live together otherwise, the survivor lives alone until the family is completely dissolved.

Depending on how the children turned out to be in the pursuit of their careers or kinds of life, in general, they are manifestations of how the aging parents had succeeded, or failed, in their social evolutionary tasks, which I had discussed in my previous column.

Accordingly, children who are now socially- and economically-stable become sources also of financial support of parents, particularly those unmindful of their own future after retirement just to secure their children.

So the support of children to aging parents further illustrates how the former are also evolutionary mechanisms in extending the life of aging parents through emotional and financial support for their basic and health needs.

Although not expected by a majority of parents, because offspring nurturing for them is a responsibility, children assume that supporting aging parents is a cultural obligation given the strong family values in Filipino culture.

This was also reflected in a national survey on aging in the Philippines done by the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (2019).

In the 2019 Metro Dumaguete survey we did of households of or with older persons aged 60 years old and above, only eight percent had spouses who lived together, 12 percent had either the surviving spouse who lived alone in a house, and 80 percent lived with children and other relatives.

However, we failed to clarify if the married children co-resided with their parents, or if the former took the latter into their house so they could be taken care of.

Either which type of co-residency was prevalent, the data imply the evolutionary significance of nurturing quality children to the aging process in the Filipino culture.

Otherwise, the absence of caring children will be compensated by sending aging parents to institutions who can securely provide their healthcare needs at a cost or by hiring professional caregivers.

But this arrangement is not yet consistent with Filipino family values, and not also popular in rural communities.

Moreover, the financial assistance from children to their aging parents must be variable relative to their socioeconomic conditions.

Majority of the parents received assistance when they asked for it, but only during emergencies like for their healthcare needs.

Financial assistance was not in a regular basis unlike the 32 percent and four percent, respectively, who said they got assistance monthly and weekly. These older persons must have financially stable children.

Take note that the support for aging parents does not come only in monetary terms.

The national survey also documented a good number of children who provided emotional support, being in direct contact with aging parents, particularly those coresidents.

Expectedly, children living away, and busy with work, must have compensated their physical absence by giving more financial and material support.

Meanwhile, daughters were often the healthcare givers who happened to co-reside with aging parents or who lived nearby, if they were married–making Filipino family more matricentric.

This is also true to unmarried daughters who become de facto primary caregivers than the sons, according to the national survey.

The cultural assumption of such caring role may be viewed as the evolutionary significance of single blessedness for daughters in particular.

So for those who have only sons, unjustly or generally viewed as less nurturing, we really have to prepare ourselves now how to survive aging.

Or we have to modify or correct the cultural patterns of gendered assumptions how children deal with their aging parents.

It is not only an obligation of the daughters alone to care for aging parents. Lessons in all levels at school should enrich the teaching about caring for older persons in general, amid the greying of the Philippine population.

_____________________________________

Author’s email:
[email protected]

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