Abstract

After four decades of China’s family planning policy, the shrinking family size and increasing life expectancy pose special challenges for the one-child generation in terms of providing care for aging parents. The current study explored young adults’ responses to such pressure by examining their concerns about elder care, attitudes toward nursing homes, and living arrangement after marriage in a sample of 473 Chinese working young adults from six cities in China (46.9% males, Mage = 25.1 years, 47.8% only children). Results showed that although most of the young adults reported to have thought about the issue of parents’ elder care, the majority did not worry a lot about it. Only children expressed similar levels of worrying as those with siblings did. However, educational level, rather than sibling status, was systematically related to concerns about parents’ elder care and attitudes toward nursing homes. People with higher education tended to worry less about elder care, and were less likely to consider placing parents in nursing homes as a violation of filial piety. Analyses of the married sub-sample (n = 140) revealed that only children were more likely to co-reside with parents after marriage than those with siblings. And the main reason for co-residence was that the younger generation needed their parents’ help for childcare, rather than to better take care of their parents. Implications for parents’ elder care among Chinese only children were discussed.

Highlights

  • Support for the elderly has long been the primary mode of elderly support in Chinese society

  • With the trimmed sample of married young adults (n = 140), we examined whether singleton status could affect living arrangement after marriage and how that would relate to parents’ elder care

  • Existing studies by demographers and sociologists have primarily focused on intentions for old-age support from the perspective of parents (e.g., Gustafson and Huang, 2014; Shan, 2016; Tao and Liu, 2019), less is known about first-generation only children’s concerns, values, and future plans regarding their parents’ elder care

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Summary

Introduction

Support for the elderly has long been the primary mode of elderly support in Chinese society. Despite widespread concerns about only children’s readiness for shouldering their filial duty of parental old-age care (e.g., Feng, 2015), empirical studies on how singleton status could affect young people’s concerns, values, and plans for parental elder care are scarce. The current study attempted to provide preliminary answers to these questions by comparing only children and those with siblings in a sample of Chinese working young adults. Filial piety (xiao) had been the primary virtue in Chinese families (Deutsch, 2006). Despite dramatic socio-economic changes taking place in China, recent research has shown that the core value of filial piety is still highly valued by young people (e.g., Gui and Koropeckyj-Cox, 2016; Liu and Li, 2020)

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