Did Children Matter in Financial Support to Old Parents?

Xiaochun Qiao, Peking University
Kaiti Zhang, China Research Center on Aging

The objective is to explore the financial contribution to elderly parents from their own children and the effect of the number and sex of children on the family support of the elderly in rural China. The hypothesis is that the elderly in rural areas are highly dependent of the support from children. The data used for this paper are from two national aging surveys conducted in 1992 and 2000. We decomposed the total earnings of the elderly into three parts: self income, self plus social support, and self plus social support plus children’s support. Then we calculated the contribution from the children’s support, i.e. so called family support. We will also conduct multivariate analysis defining total income of the elderly as the response variable, the number and sex of their children as explanatory variable, and some demographic and socioeconomic characteristics as the control variables. The hypothesis has been verified.