Filial piety—the Confucian dictate that children should provide care, support, respect, and obedience to their older parents—is a fundamental, normative expectation in East Asian societies. In this presentation, I examine variation in perceptions of filial piety of adult children by their older parents in rural China, focusing on the impact of co-residence and migration status and the compensatory behaviours of more distant children that mitigate assessments of them as less than “filial”. The data source is the 2021 wave of the Longitudinal Study of Older Adults in Anhui Province, China, which includes 1,489 parents aged 60 and older and their relationships with 3,934 adult children. Parents provided information about each child in terms of demographic characteristics, intergenerational exchanges, and the degree to which the child is perceived as being “filial”. Results affirm the importance of instrumental support and particularly monetary support in enhancing assessments of filial piety of more distant children relative to co-resident children. Parents with stronger normative expectations held their more distant children to a higher standard for being filial. Finally, functional impairment caused more distant children to be evaluated as less filial, ostensibly because those children were in a weaker position to respond to their parent’s elevated support needs. Overall, the results speak to the adaptable nature of filial piety when family change and migration put pressure on younger generations, which, in highly dynamic rural China, is causing concern about the viability of intergenerational support for older parents.

Speaker Biography

Merril Silverstein
Syracuse University, United States

Merril Silverstein, PhD, is inaugural holder of the Marjorie Cantor Chair in Aging Studies at Syracuse University and serves as professor in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Human Development and Family Science. Professor Silverstein received his doctorate in Sociology from Columbia University, after which he served on the faculty of the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California. In over 200 research publications, he has focused on ageing in the context of family life, with an emphasis on intergenerational relations over the life course and international-comparative perspectives. Professor Silverstein currently serves as principal investigator for the Longitudinal Study of Generations, which has collected data from the same families for over fifty years, and is co-originator of the Longitudinal Study of Older Adults in Anhui Province, China, now in its 20th year. Professor Silverstein is a Fellow of the Brookdale Foundation, the Fulbright Senior Scholars program, the Gerontological Society of America, and the James Martin School at Oxford University. Between 2010-2014, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences. In 2019, he was awarded the Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar Award from the Section on Aging and the Life Course of the American Sociological Association.

About the Presenter(s)
Merril Silverstein, PhD, is inaugural holder of the Marjorie Cantor Chair in Aging Studies at Syracuse University and serves as professor in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Human Development and Family Science.

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