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Intergenerational Support and Life Satisfaction of Older Parents in China: A Rural–Urban Divide

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Abstract

In the past few decades, Chinese families have experienced unprecedented economic growth. In addition to growth, public policies have changed and developed, internal migration has rapidly increased, and social conditions have generally evolved. Living arrangements in particular have transformed, which likely affects the expectations and preferences of older parents to rely on their children. We use the first two waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), a nationally representative sample of older adults in China, to examine the relationship between intergenerational support and life satisfaction in both rural and urban China. In rural villages, we find that living with grandchildren is associated with a higher level of life satisfaction; this is true even in households without parents (i.e., skip-generation households). Higher life satisfaction is also attributable to receiving instrumental support (i.e., help with self-care and household tasks) from children and exchanging financial and emotional support with them. In urban neighborhoods, in contrast, living in a skip-generation household is associated with a lower level of life satisfaction, and only one type of functional support from children is beneficial for older parents’ life satisfaction—instrumental support. Our findings indicate that there is a rural–urban divide in the relationships between life satisfaction and intergenerational support in contemporary China and suggest that development has weakened historical relationships in both rural and urban areas.

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Notes

  1. The terms “life satisfaction” and “happiness” are used interchangeably in this paper and refer to satisfaction with life as a whole.

  2. The hukou (household registration) system has been established since 1950s as the main way to identify rural or urban identity and to control migration from rural to urban areas.

  3. The national rural pension pilot (New Rural Social Pension Scheme) was announced in 2009 and started in late 2009 with an aim to achieve full geographic coverage no later than 2013 (State Council 2009b).

  4. The basic pension level is 55 yuan (less than $10) per month, which is below the rural poverty line.

  5. Family planning policies in China are primarily designed for Han families, who constitute about 92 percent of the overall population in mainland China. Han families are almost the majority in every province, municipality, and autonomous region except for the autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet Autonomous Region. Non-Han families are covered in more relaxed forms of family planning policies.

  6. There are, in general, three dimensions of SWB, namely, life evaluations, affect and eudaimonia. Affect, which is defined as a person’s feelings or emotional state, is measured with reference to one point in time. Eudaimonia considers a person’s meaning and purpose in life.

  7. For instance, according to Chen and Silverstein (2000), the parent–child relationship has become less hierarchical over time.

  8. Institutionalized middle-aged and elderly individuals are not sampled, but the wave 1 respondents who later enter into an institution are followed.

  9. Tibet is excluded.

  10. Without any sample selection criteria, for older adults aged 60 years and above, there are 14,737 observations in two waves, with 78 percent living in rural villages. With less-restricted selection criteria, the information on basic demographic and socioeconomic characteristics should be available, and there are 11,406 observations in total and 79 percent who live in rural villages. By comparing the descriptive statistics of the basic demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the 11,406 observations and those of our analytic sample with 8,004 observations, we do not observe any significant differences.

  11. Only the respondents with non-coresident children were asked about financial transfers and the frequency of seeing children.

  12. Only the respondents with grandchildren under 16 years of age were asked about whether they take care of grandchildren or not.

  13. Similar to what Silverstein and colleagues (2006) find, summing across all children produces weaker results in our models. This suggests that the amount of assistance received from a main provider or the amount of assistance given to a main receiver matters more than the total transfer amount.

  14. ADLs include dressing, bathing or showering, eating, getting into or out of bed, using the toilet, and controlling urination and defecation.

  15. IADLs include doing household chores, preparing hot meals, shopping for groceries, managing money, and taking medications.

  16. We also constructed a variable named “seeing children at least once a month”, and this variable takes the value of 1 if a respondent lives with his or her children or sees non-coresident children at least once a month. We tried replacing “seeing non-coresident children at least once a month” with this variable, and the results appeared to be very similar.

  17. This variable has to be omitted when the instrumental support measures are in the model.

  18. Public pension enrolment and work status have not been highly related in contemporary China. For our sample of older parents, the correlation between work status and public pension enrollment is pretty low: correlation coefficients are 0.033 and -0.039 for rural and urban parents, respectively.

  19. Consumption expenditures can be measured with less noise than income and provide a more accurate measure of long-term resources than income does.

  20. We do not consider whether living with parents or parents-in-law to be an independent variable of interest because only approximately 1 percent of older parents live with their parents or parents-in-law.

  21. One exception is that the marginally significant coefficient on “have three children and above” becomes insignificant after the addition of the functional support variables.

  22. A few coefficients are less significant than the coefficients for the entire urban sample in the main analysis potentially because of the small-cell-size problem.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Fengyu Wu

  2. Eudaimonia Institute, Wake Forest University, 2599 Reynolda Road, Winston-Salem, NC, 27106, USA

    Fengyu Wu

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Appendix

Appendix

Tables

Table 6 Proportions of non-traditional types of living arrangements in China (2011 and 2013)
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Table 7 Regression results on life satisfaction of urban older parents with rural hukou, respondents aged 60 and over
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Table 8 Regression results on life satisfaction of urban older parents with urban hukou, respondents aged 60 and over
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Table 9 Regression results on life satisfaction of rural older parents (FE estimation), respondents aged 60 and over
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Table 10 Regression results on life satisfaction of urban older parents (FE estimation), respondents aged 60 and over
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Wu, F. Intergenerational Support and Life Satisfaction of Older Parents in China: A Rural–Urban Divide. Soc Indic Res 160, 1071–1098 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-021-02672-0

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