Do sons contribute more toward elderly care? Premium

Analysing a paper which talks about the contributions of sons and daughters to the care of their parents and how womens’ care is often overlooked

Srinivasan, Sharada, S. Irudaya Rajan, Aswini Nanda, and Arjun Bedi (2023). ‘Married Daughters’ Contributions to Elderly Parents’ Well-Being: A Review and Evidence from Haryana, India. S.I. Rajan (ed) Handbook of Aging, Health and Public Policy.

By 2050, India’s elderly population will touch 319 million — three times the number identified by the 2011 Census. The number of people over the age of 60 is projected to increase from 8.6% of the population (2011 Census) to 20% by 2050. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of India’s elderly are not covered, or covered adequately, by pension and social welfare. Therefore, the burden often falls on children to take care of their parents. In this context, old age support is one of the main factors driving the preference for a son. And our society is known to prefer sons, to the extent of resorting to illegal sex selective abortion.

In this paper, which brings together gender and intergenerational dynamics in conjunction with expectations of children, the authors analyse “the relative contributions of sons and daughters to the well-being of their parents, especially in the absence of sons.” It has two segments: a review of the existing research on this subject, and a field-work based study conducted in Haryana, a State known for relatively low women’s status, high son preference, and a large daughter deficit. In the process, the authors draw attention to the contributions that married daughters make to their natal families — an aspect that tends to become invisibilised in a patrilocal culture (a residence pattern where a woman shifts to her husband’s home or community after marriage).

Significantly, the analysis is embedded in a political economy framework, which holds that people have children not only out of love or for emotional reasons but also because “they invest in children as a way of guaranteeing their future, both in terms of the continuity of lineage and their own care once they become old.” In fact, the review of existing literature shows this to be the case in different countries and cultures, “especially in a context of poor economic development and/or in the absence of universal pension or social welfare.”

In the West, the welfare of the elderly is guaranteed through relatively well-funded pension and social security systems. But in India, which has the world’s second largest population of people over the age of 60 and where over 90% of the workforce is in the unorganised sector, pensions are limited to a tiny minority employed in the public sector, and to a lesser extent, in the private sector. In other words, “economic and social policies to ensure the welfare of the elderly in India are limited” in a context where “poverty incidence is higher among the elderly, especially older women,” leading to greater economic dependency. They thus end up relying on family and their own labour to take care of themselves. This is where a son becomes “preferable” over a daughter. “While a son contributes economically even after marriage, it is by bringing a daughter-in-law that he ensures the care of his parents especially when they grow old.”

As a result, “son preference reinforces lower status of women through sex selection as well as discrimination against surviving daughters.” Also, parents with sons, through the practice of arranged marriage, tend to select “submissive daughters-in-law to ensure old age support”, which again affects gender equality. The flip side of this practice is that “since a (married) daughter is not expected to care for her natal family, not only is she valued less but it is likely that her contributions are invisibilised.” Existing research also suggests that “sons may not always care for their parents out of a sense of duty but may do so to derive benefits from providing support, for example, a higher inheritance or elderly parents taking care of grandchildren.”

A key study referenced in the paper is the Korean success story in reversing sex ratio imbalance, which suggests that an effective strategy to curb “daughter elimination” — rampant in States like Haryana — is “publicly financed policies to ensure financial support and health care for the elderly” which can reduce their dependence on sons.