Norms of Filial Responsibility for Aging Parents Across Time and Generations

This investigation examined the normative expectation that adult children should be responsible for the care of their aging parents, and how this norm changes over the adult life span, across several decades of historical time, in relation to generational position in families, and between successive generations. Analyses were performed using 4 waves of data from the University of Southern California (USC) Longitudinal Study of Generations between 1985 and 2000. A multilevel latent growth model was estimated using 4,527 observations from 1,627 individuals nested within 333 families. Results revealed that filial norms weakened after midlife, in response to parental death, and over historical time, yet strengthened in later‐born generations. Findings are discussed in terms of the malleability of filial responsibility over the life course.     

THE TIES THAT BIND: Family Surveillance of Canadian Parolees

This article combines the Foucauldian governmentality principles of managing troublesome populations with the actual everyday institutional discourse at parole hearings. The article illuminates how parole board members, inmates, and inmates' family members participate collaboratively in the construction of inmate identities as either parolees who should be released to the community or as prisoners who should remain in prison. The Foucauldian governmentality principles are complemented by a family attachment perspective whereby an offender's stake in conformity is promoted. Board members use a typology of caring and uncaring families to organize the parole hearings. This typology includes caring inmate mothers, caring inmate fathers, caring female partners uncaring inmate fathers, uncaring male partners, and uncaring female partners.     

Aging and Family Life: A Decade Review

In this review, we summarize and critically evaluate the major empirical, conceptual, and theoretical directions that studies of aging families have taken during the first decade of the 21st century. The field has benefited from an expanded perspective based on four overarching themes: (a) complexity in emotional relations, (b) diversity in family structures and households, (c) interdependence of family roles and functions, and (d) patterns and outcomes of caregiving. Although research on aging families has advanced theory and applied innovative statistical techniques, the literature has fallen short in fully representing diverse populations and in applying the broadest set of methodological tools available. We discuss these and other frontier areas of scholarship in light of the aging of baby boomers and their families.     

Purchasing Piety? Coresidence of Married Children With Their Older Parents in Japan

We investigated the conditions under which married children live with their older parents in Japan. We focused on how needs and resources in each generation are associated with whether married couples live with their parents in parent-headed and child-headed households, and we also investigated difference in power relations between older and younger generations and between children and their spouses. We analyzed a nationally representative sample of older parents (n = 3,853) and their married children (n = 8,601) from the 1999 Nihon University Japanese Longitudinal Study of Aging (NUJLSOA). Mutinomial regression revealed that married children with relatively affluent parents tended to live with them in parent-headed households and that married children with parents who are in relatively poor health or who are widowed tended to live with them in child-headed households. We also found that less-educated married children tended to live in the households of their higher-income parents, suggesting that parents may be "purchasing" traditional arrangements with less-affluent children. In addition, children with an educational advantage over their spouses were more likely to have parents living with them in child-headed coresident households. We conclude that traditional multigenerational coresidence has become a commodity negotiated within families based on relative resources and needs within and across generations.     

A Vignette Study on Gendered Filial Expectations of Elders in Rural China

This investigation integrated vignette and survey design to study how sons' reduced availability and daughters' increased contributions to parents influenced Chinese rural elders' gendered filial expectations, measured with their beliefs about obligations of a vignette daughter and a vignette son to their postsurgery parent. The sample included 802 elders from 2001, 2003, and 2006 waves of a longitudinal study on rural elders in Anhui Province, China. Multinomial logistic regressions showed that the vignette sons' migration and actual daughters' previous contributions increased elder women's, but not men's, endorsement of the vignette daughter's obligations. The vignette son's child‐care responsibilities affected neither women's nor men's beliefs, but the vignette daughters' migration and child‐care responsibilities reduced respondents' expectations of the vignette daughter. This study directs attention to the discrepancy between social changes and individuals' attitudes because of structural lags as well as to the importance of examining factors that will reduce the discrepancy.     

The Structure of Intergenerational Relations in Rural China: A Latent Class Analysis

Most existing typology studies of intergenerational relations have used samples in North America and Europe. The present study expands on previous research by determining whether similar family relation typologies could be found using a sample of Chinese rural elders. The data were derived from a survey of 1,224 older adults in China's rural Anhui province in 2009. Latent class analysis revealed 5 types of intergenerational relations in rural Chinese families: (a) tight‐knit, (b) nearby but discordant, (c) distant discordant, (d) distant reciprocal, and (e) distant ascending. The authors argue that the distant ascending ties reflect the strong filial obligations that Chinese adult children have toward their parents and that the distant reciprocal ties reflect collaborative and mutually beneficial parent–child relations in rural China in the context of massive rural‐to‐urban migration. The findings of this study demonstrate how family relations in contemporary China are shaped by the larger economic, geographic, and cultural contexts.     

The Older Sandwich Generation Across European Welfare Regimes: Demographic and Social Considerations

European Journal of Population - The lengthening of the amount of time adult children depend on their parents’ support and rising longevity have pushed scholars to devote increasing attention...