Is filial piety a reliable basis for intergenerational support?
June 1, 2022
The Global Day of Parents falls on 1 June every year, proclaimed by the United Nations to appreciate all parents for their selfless commitment to children and their lifelong sacrifice towards nurturing this relationship.
In Confucian societies, including Singapore, the basis of intergenerational support is filial piety, a value which prescribes that adult children have an obligation to support their parents if they are in need. In Singapore, children are often produced and raised as part of one’s retirement planning, and filial piety is taken as an incontestable social expectation. Failure to accept filial piety would thus result in both moral and legal sanctions to enforce compliance.
Where parents are financially independent or when adult children have the capacity to support their dependent parents, compliance to the value of filial piety would be unproblematic, or even intrinsically satisfying. However, a problem arises when adult children lack the capacity to support their dependent parents. Even with moral and legal sanctions, these adult children are neither able to, nor feel the need to comply with this notion of filial piety. Filial piety thus cannot be considered a reliable basis for ensuring that adult children will take care of their dependent parents.
In ‘Is filial piety a reliable basis for intergenerational support?’, a chapter in Family and Population in Asia (2019), Associate Professor Tan Ern Ser (NUS Department of Sociology) argues that love is a more reliable basis than filial piety for ensuring parents are supported. Rather than the self-centric value of filial piety, love is relationship-centric. Children choose to support their parents not to repay any debts they owe to their parents or because of the law, but based on love for their parents. Likewise, parents choose to have children because they desire to have someone to give love to, rather than children being part of a retirement plan.
From the results gleaned from the Social Stratification Survey 2011, which was part of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Exchange Series, A/P Tan found that 56 percent of the 2,700 participants, who were ages 15 to 74, considered “love for one’s parents” as a reason for “providing financial support to parents in old age”, compared to 17 percent who saw intergenerational transfers as a form of transaction, and another 17 percent who viewed supporting dependent parents to be an obligation or social expectation.
A/P Tan also explained that there is a positive correlation between class and the basis of inter-generational transfers. People with higher income are more likely to see “love for one’s parents” as a basis for providing financial support to dependent parents than those with lower income. Additionally, 75 percent of high-income people, as compared to 35 percent of low-income people, considered “love for children” as the main motivation for raising children.
In this way, as Singapore becomes more of a middle-class society in the future, “love” will predominate over filial piety. Public campaigns and education should therefore emphasise love rather than filial piety as an obligation, as the key ingredient to building strong family bonds.
Read the chapter here.