This is a core value in many eastern cultures. I'm not trying to put down western cultures - only pointing out a difference - I do not believe it is a core value of western cultures (i'd love to be proven wrong of course).
Also, when children grow up and move away, or immigrate to a different countries, this produces problems to the ageing parents.
Multi-generational, western (American) guy here: caring for the older generations is a core value to everyone I know and to me. We just don't _have_ to. My mom has money, can drive, owns a nicer house than I do. So, it's really only for 'values' that I check in on her and handyman for her whenever I can. In fact, for the latter, I cause her more problems than I fix.
Observation: Sooner or later, all of our family's elders have wound up cared for by a mix of children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. Even those who didn't have children. We're an ornery bunch, so quite a few stubbornly insisted they didn't need anyone, yet eventually they did. Care often came at an inconvenience to those providing it, but one way or another, in one form or another, care was given. I can only think of one person from my extended family who wasn't cared for by the younger generations in his final years.
Speculation: The average number of children in my extended family hovers around three, and most of us are in a few geographic clusters (not the same city, but still a cluster). Perhaps if the average litter was between one and two, and/or we were more spread apart, we may have slipped into line with that stereotype?
In particular, the public is wildly uneducated about the interdependencies they implicitly rely on and take for granted, until they get old one day and realize the negligence.
The general idea in the US is, you have to prepare for yourself, in the EU the premise is, the state prepares for you. Both are oversimplifications that don't really work more often than people want to admit.
The change seems to have more to do with the atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite. Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional, career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions, and that necessity then supersedes the actual relationships and responsibilities that had traditionally been taken for granted and free from accounting.
It's a death spiral towards alienation that we stumbled into in modernity and need to collectively address, not a cultural divide between east and west.
Could you explain these a bit more (or maybe provide a pointer to they mean):
> "atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite."
How & why exactly do they invite atomization?
> "Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional... career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions"
By this do you mean something like: instead of relying on friends and family for interdependece, we pay for services in a formal economy ?
> How & why exactly do they invite atomization?
Economies of scale make the commercial services more efficient. Similarly to how my grandma cannot compete in keeping chickens and selling eggs against a huge agricultural corporation, for a working-age person to stay at home and care for their parents is less economical than if this person performs some specialized work at a job, and there are a bunch of other, trained employees taking care of several old people e.g. in a retirement home.
It may have some social functions that get lost, but it gets outcompeted by scalable, specialized, formal-economy alternatives.
Also industrialization made many tasks possible to do alone. With washing machines, microwaves and TV dinners, people can live on their own indefinitely, while this simply wasn't possible before in a farming and manual labor context where you constantly had to ask for and to provide help getting things done. Like building a house, slaughtering a pig, doing field work etc.
Assets and income were passed down patrilineally, and hence women were expected to fold into their husband’s family and become the primary caretakers (unless super rich and they had servants).
The problem comes when the government forcefully takes resources from young workers and gives them to old people. You can’t choose independence when young and also choose to depend on someone else. That is trying to have your cake and eat it too, hence all the fretting about unsustainable pension systems around the world.
we take care of our own. It's very much part of our core values.
To some extent, yes, it is unfortunate that Western culture has abandoned that cultural value.
However, it's also been incredibly liberating to a great many people.
When it's a cultural value to take care of your parents when they are elderly, to the point of shaming adult children who refuse to do so, it lends itself all too easily to abuse. And there are a lot of abusive parents out there. This is particularly true among queer people, who have only recently (generationally speaking) been able to be out in a widespread manner.
Furthermore, for the current generations of elderly and their children, the chances are higher than ever that the elderly parents have much, much more in the way of resources to take care of themselves than their children have.
The atomization of our society is a genuine problem, and we need to find some good society-level solutions for it. But socially demanding that children care for their parents, no matter how awful those parents were to the children (or still are!) is not something that we should bring back.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01312b.htm
But we in the U.S.A. have cast off the chains of interdependence, and adopted the Enlightenment ethos of rugged individualism and consumerism that defines American values. Who needs grandparents, or husbands, or family support when we can train and pay mercenaries to care about us! All praise, glory and power be to our Constitution!
Isn’t the institution of marriage itself a form of social engineering? I agree that trying to build new social institutions from whole cloth is a huge lift, but at the same time I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine alternative social arrangements that allow for the care of the elderly.
Its absence and the resultant breakdown is being observed in real-time, it should be no surprise that the degradation of society from its absence takes a long time to be felt and it will take a long time to repair this error.
/married for 20 years
Not around here; many parents and grandparents are put away in care homes. The tax code even penalizes multiple generations living together as many elderly benefits are conditional on total household income.