Intergenerational Aspirations Across the Life Course in Asia

Abstract

Articles in this special issue probe the relationships between strategies for upward socio-economic mobility and intergenerational aspirations in Asia. With capitalism, urbanisation, mass media, education and migration increasing throughout Asia, now is a time of flux in opportunities and subjectivities. Such changes are lived as deeply personal and relational. Young people are often instrumental to familial ‘development’ strategies, and this effects divisions of labour, norms of moral economy, life course ideals and distributions of power. At the same time, media, education and development discourses often exhort people to author autonomous destinies through entrepreneurialism, career and consumerism. Contributors to this issue, ‘Development, Gender and Intergenerational Aspirations in Asia’, ethnographically explore how old and new dreams—some emphasising autonomy, while others stress familial obligation—conjoin, elide and compete, and how people negotiate associated life course expectations. We also show how dreams find limits, requiring redreaming and rerouting.

Keywords:

• Intergenerational Relations
• Family
• Gender
• Youth
• Development
• Socio-economic Mobility
• Dreams
• Hope
• Transitions
• Life Scripts

Intergenerational Dreaming

Dreaming is often an intergenerational project. Aspirations—such as for improved financial prosperity and stability, increased consumption and leisure, better health and wellbeing, increased social status, or growth in cosmopolitan knowledge, mobility and experience—may be unachievable or unimaginable as personal life projects alone. Strategies for upward socio-economic mobility can be truly intergenerational, depending on mutual ‘buy-in’ and cooperation across generations. They can be cross-generational—often parents working to give their children better lives than they have. People also hold more individual dreams, which can coincide or collide with intergenerational expectations and aspirations.

Articles in this special issue, ‘Development, Gender and Intergenerational Aspirations in Asia’, focus on five poor and middle-class ethnographic field sites across Asia—in the Philippines, Myanmar, India (Delhi and Uttarakhand) and Nepal.¹ Contributors consider the lived experiences of negotiating intergenerational aspirations, including the (in)compatibility of different kinds of dreams.² We also highlight the space where transversal discourses of development meet dreams that are personal and familial. While this volume is not exclusively focused on girls and women, three of the articles give particular attention to their perspectives.³ We see the emphasis on girls and women as both a limitation⁴ and a strength of the issue—placing a firm focus on the complexities of gendered agency at a time when girls and women are increasingly seen as recipients and drivers of socio-economic change.

Indeed, girls and young women have recently risen to international attention as pivotal agents of familial and community ‘development’. With the 2008 launch of The Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ media campaign, the spectre of the adolescent girl burst into international development debates and agendas as the new, strategic ‘change agent’.⁵ ‘The girl effect’, as Girl Hub promotional material states, ‘is about leveraging the unique potential of adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves, their families, their communities, their countries and the world’ (quoted in Hickel 2014, 1362, emphasis added). Promotional material for another popular resource—the book Half the Sky: How to Change the World by Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn—declares: ‘Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited resource is the female half of the population’ (Half the Sky Movement 2020, emphasis added). This bestseller explains the girl effect as follows:

Economists who scrutinized East Asia’s success noted a common pattern. These countries took young women who previously had contributed negligibly to gross national product (GNP) and injected them into the formal economy, hugely increasing the labor force. The basic formula was to ease repression, educate girls as well as boys, give the girls the freedom to move to the cities and take factory jobs, and then benefit from a demographic dividend as they delayed marriage and reduced childbearing. The women meanwhile financed the education of younger relatives, and saved enough of their pay to boost the national savings rate. (Kristof & WuDunn 2009, xix)

The girl effect discourse at once critiques ‘traditional’ kinship norms, and seeks to harness them. It is premised on a model of intergenerational socio-economic mobility that favours autonomous individualism and the nuclear family, yet also relies on kin-based altruism to operate. Traditional culture and family forms are held responsible for stifling the productive potential of girls in the Majority World—neglecting their education, forcing them into early marriages and pregnancies, binding them to domestic duties and perpetuating cycles of poverty (Hickel 2014). The solution is to invest in girls’ education and health, and to encourage their physical mobility and participation in the labour market. Girls will share their gains with family and pass them on to the next generation. At times the girl effect takes a neoliberal bent, seeing investment in girls as ‘smart economics’.

The girl effect has attracted scholarly critique,⁶ and while essays in this special issue do not specifically engage with these debates, I introduce the concept here because it entails a constellation of connections—and tensions—that strike at the heart of contributions to this issue. The concept of the girl effect recognises and promotes the ‘strategic’ position of young people in their families (as most families in our studies were already doing themselves); it connects personal life projects with major socio-economic change (as some organisations within our fieldsites have sought to do); it focuses on education, migration and employment, marriage and childrearing (which were major themes in the lives of many of those we interviewed); it is ambivalent about the relational personhood of women (as many of the women we spoke to were themselves); and it shades out a focus on older women (who, as one of the contributors to this volume emphasises, are also worthy of investment).

Articles in this volume bring to the fore the stories of individuals in our field sites—many of whom were strongly future oriented and envisioned paths that were untrodden within the context of their own families. Considering their experiences in larger ethnographic contexts, we ask questions including: What expectations are placed on young people to contribute to strategies for familial socio-economic mobility? What other key discourses shape their aspirations and from where do these emanate? In particular, how do discourses of ‘development’, ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ inform aspirations? To what extent are aspirations shared or contested across generations? How do pre-existing life course expectations fit, or sit in tension, with newer expectations that may emphasise education, career and mobility? In this context, how do individualist versus collectivist notions of personhood articulate with one another in people’s day-to-day lives? Finally, how do people negotiate their goals in the face of major structural constraints? Ultimately, we consider how people seek to live ‘good’ lives—negotiating varied subject positions, obligations and aspirations—in a time of unprecedented change. The articles show distinct similarities but also important differences between the field sites, which relate to culture, age (early teens to mid-fifties) and class (from poor to middle class).

In this Introduction, I review the main themes cross-cutting the essays in this volume and contextualise these. I present these themes roughly in relation to the life course, considering a range of key life dimensions including education, migration, marriage, parenting and employment. (While I provide an overview of each article in this volume at specific points in that narrative, in practice there is substantial thematic interconnection between the articles, as well as between life dimensions.) This is not intended as a ‘comprehensive’ review of the diversity of intergenerational aspirations and familial strategies for upward mobility in Asia (for example, similar work with greater attention to older people’s perspectives would be merited), but serves to frame the articles in this volume.

Together the contributions show that young people are often viewed as pivotal to familial ‘development’, and senior generations invest heavily in them relative to their means (particularly in certain forms of education), often compromising or sacrificing their own personal goals for the time being. Especially for poorer families in contexts of little public entitlements, this can be tied to expectations of return as part of an ‘intergenerational contract’. However, across Asia, individuals are negotiating multiple, strong and contending discourses on how to lead fulfilling and moral lives. Liberal ideals—encouraging people to ‘dream big’ and author their own biographies through personal choice, hard work and self-mastery—emanate from the media, education and development institutions, and become imbibed in people’s identities and visions. These can sit uneasily beside discourses emphasising familial obligation or ‘traditional’ roles, sometimes generating in people a sense of conflict or ambivalence. In addition, both personal and familial aspirations are often tightly hemmed by structural constraints, meaning paths are uncertain, difficult and precarious, necessitating rerouting paths or revising dreams.

Negotiating the Life Course

Articles in this issue capture people at life stages ripe with hope and risk. Moments of possibility open and close, partly in relation to specific cultural ideals for life paths or ‘scripts’—standardised sequences people expect, aspire or are obliged to follow. Life scripts can involve the interplay of dimensions such as education, work, migration, marriage and family. Possibilities and aspirations are also influenced by intersecting factors such as gender, sexuality, location, class and caste. In other words, scripts can be different for women compared to men, rural versus urban residents, poorer classes compared to middle classes, and even older siblings compared to younger ones.

Life scripts relate to what youth researchers have termed ‘youth transitions’ to denote norms of change in circumstance and status as young people pass from childhood to adulthood.⁷ Several of the articles in this issue focus particularly on youth, as in many parts of Asia and beyond this is a period when tensions around intergenerational aspirations seem especially manifest, and as such I briefly present some key themes from the youth transitions literature. However, as Tanya Jakimow (this issue) reminds us, transitions and aspirations also characterise later life stages—a point to which I will return.

Literature on youth transitions has grown from sociological work on the Minority World, and as Johanna Wyn, Sarah Lantz and Anita Harris (2011, 3–4) note, while ‘family is almost universally acknowledged to be important in young people’s lives … the lived nature of relationships between young people and families remains relatively underinvestigated’. The literature has also tended to emphasise growing independence. There is, though, increasing scholarship on the Majority World including an important strand of ethnographic contributions highlighting complex realities, often involving interdependencies with family, and diversities, divergences, contingencies and reversals relative to ‘ideal’ scripts (for example, Punch 2015; Nilan et al. 2016; Langevang 2008; Cooper 2018).

In many societies, especially rural settings, the transition to adulthood was once relatively straightforward and swift, centring on marriage, parenthood and the adoption of livelihoods similar to earlier generations. Yet past norms of transition are often no longer seen as fully viable or desirable; nor are they completely abandoned (for example, Nilan et al. 2016, 25). Livelihood strategies that once focused on local agriculture may now require education and/or migration. Education can necessitate longer financial dependence on family while delaying employment, marriage and parenthood (Gómez-Urrutia & Urrizola 2017, 506; Nilan et al. 2016, 24)—essentially protracting ‘youth’. As several articles in this volume show (Bulloch 2021; Becker 2021; Chambers 2021), the widespread uptake of tertiary study has opened new subject positions to young people, involving new forms of independence, responsibility, status and self-conception. Tertiary education may allow for more freedom of mobility and association; and it taps into notions of personal growth and self-improvement. Young people are encouraged to see their path ahead as defined by an independent career that will shape their selfhood. Meanwhile, global media exposes people to new possibilities, such as companionate marriage and nuclear family, and can reshape norms of courtship, residence and family formation. At the same time, other norms, such as an emphasis on marriage and parenthood as markers of full adulthood, may remain. Old and new scripts can sit in uneasy synthesis, and aspirations may or may not be shared between generations.

Transitions to adulthood are becoming more varied, circuitous, precarious, challenging and risky than they once were (Juárez & Gayet 2014, 522; Langevang 2008, 2040; Johnson-Hanks 2002; Cooper 2018, 667; Naafs & Skelton 2018). For the poor, education is expensive and it may not be possible for a student to complete their studies in one stint. They may have to pause study in favour of work, or wait until family circumstances enable them to resume. In contexts where marriage and pregnancy are ‘ideally’ deferred for education and employment, unplanned pregnancies can derail carefully laid plans. Even if one finishes studying, higher education is no guarantee of a job, pay is often low, and positions are highly competitive. The resources to marry and establish a family may remain beyond reach. While there may be a societal ideal for a linear succession of transitions, for individuals the realities can be messy. As Jennifer Johnson-Hanks (2002, 869) states in relation to Cameroon: ‘the key transitions that might be seen as aspects of adulthood do not occur at the same time or in the same order; their occurrences are not highly correlated, and many of them are reversible’ (also see Langevang 2008, 2044). In what follows I explore these themes in further detail.

Education and the Liberal Production of Dreams

In much of Asia, education is regarded as a key path for upward socio-economic mobility (Yi 2015; Croll 2006). In fact, the association between the two is now widely viewed as axiomatic (Huijsmans, Ambarwati, et al. 2021), even though for disadvantaged groups the prospects of transformation through education may remain slim (Dost & Froerer 2021; Jakimow 2016). Many families invest heavily in education, in pursuit of their dreams. At the same time, educational institutions themselves—whether public (Becker 2021), private (Chambers 2021) or non-governmental (McCarthy 2021)—act as ‘dream production factories’, and the dreams they produce do not always align with familial dreams. This is an important contribution across several of the articles (McCarthy; Chambers; Becker), which focus on a space where institutionalised development and education converge, cultivating modernist-inspired subjectivities (also see, Huijsmans, Ansell, & Froerer 2021).

Annie McCarthy’s work (this issue) draws our attention to intergenerational aspirations and strategies for ‘development’ inherent in sites arguably most evocative of ‘underdevelopment’—slums. She points out that slums do not just pop up but, rather,

are built one piece of plywood, plastic sheeting, brick and concrete block after the other as people seek out better opportunities for employment, income generation and access to state services like education and health care, with the explicit intention of improving the circumstances of their families, and particularly their children’s lives. (McCarthy, personal communication)

McCarthy did fieldwork within a small NGO targeting children aged 12–16. The NGO’s goal was to ‘empower children to be change-makers within their communities’ through weekly ‘media clubs’, engaging children in creative activities, such as the production of films and street plays. Through this medium, the NGO worked to instil in the children development messages—on issues from hygiene to child marriage—and share such messages with the broader community. McCarthy (2021, 383) points out that the NGO’s approach ‘blurs the distinction between the kinds of “personal-development” opportunities available to affluent children, and the “community-development” programs that target the poor’.

With its limited resources, the NGO operated on a self-help model of development—solutions were particularly focused on individualised and personal behaviour change. In other words, the NGO encouraged future-oriented outlooks that emphasised individual agency and the potential to transcend structural constraints. It also at times sought to frame family as an obstacle to progress—the locus of patriarchal tradition to be overcome through education. Parents themselves favoured conventional education—with its focus on reading, writing and arithmetic—over extra-curricular ‘soft-skills’ provided by the NGO. Even the development workers ‘feared that rather than creating change-makers in these communities, they were perhaps producing a cohort of indulgent and frustrated dreamers’ (McCarthy 2021, 390). (Dashed dreams is a theme to which I will return.) Meanwhile, the narratives children produced in the NGO sessions often elided ‘individual’ or ‘community development’ models presented by the NGO, instead providing aspirations based on orientations toward family. They depicted family as an important source of support, wanted to be successful for their family, and were pragmatic about the realities of gendered roles and agency within which they operated.

Articles by McCarthy and Justine Chambers (detailed below) show education-cum-development organisations encouraging students/participants to ‘dream big’ and strive to overcome structural constraints in pursuit of ‘success’ defined through cosmopolitan knowledge, independence, a career and/or financial prosperity. This is part of an important theme throughout the articles regarding the roles of free will, autonomous individualism and self-actualisation in life scripts. Such discourses emphasise the individual (or the nuclear family). ‘Traditional’ kinship, as Jason Hickel (2014, 1359) points out, ‘poses a problem for the liberal conception of freedom: because it represents an arrangement wherein persons are embedded in relations of dependence that appear to override their authentic desires and hamper their prospects for self-mastery’. As such, through a notion of development as personal empowerment, some international development organisations are promoting the idea that ‘free markets … will not work properly until the people who inhabit them are liberated from “pre-modern” kinship norms’ (Hickel 2014, 1358–1359). At the same time, as myriad discourses—from popular media content to educational and development messages—encourage ever more ambitious and individualised pathways through self-mastery, self-invention, personal growth, and economic ‘rationality’, they shade out structural constraints. People are ‘increasingly exhorted to make sense of their individual biographies in terms of discourses of freedom, autonomy, and choice—no matter how constrained their lives might actually be’ (Gill & Scharff 2011, 6). This is a theme to which I will return.

Migration, Work and Plural Moralities

Migration—for education and/or employment—is a major part of intergenerational economic strategies and personal aspirations throughout Asia (Robertson, Cheng, & Yeoh 2018). It can dangle promise of increased prosperity and cosmopolitan experiences, though for many it also entails risks of drudgery and exploitation. This is one of several key themes explored by Justine Chambers (this issue), who conducted ethnographic fieldwork with young people in the city of Hpa-an—the capital of Karen State, in Myanmar—where visions of the good life are informed by Buddhist notions of karma and merit-making, and also increasingly tied to cosmopolitan patterns of consumption, new forms of employment and higher education.

Education is highly valued in Myanmar, and in the period between military rule educational institutions flourished. Chambers focuses on students of a private tertiary institution named Shining Light, which provided English tuition but also promoted ‘social development’—seeking to instil in students ‘modern’, individualised and career-oriented ways of envisioning their futures. While Shining Light founders and teachers encouraged a cosmopolitan outlook in their students, they saw economic migration to Thailand as inimical to this goal. For example, co-founder Nan Mu Htoo had worked in Thailand as a housemaid and was initially buoyed to contribute financially to her familial household. She soon became jaded, however, by a sense of exploitation, vulnerability, stagnation and discrimination, and later co-founded Shining Light to expand students’ imaginative horizons beyond economic migration.

This sits against a backdrop of Karen social ethics promoting filial obligation, and the reality that many families financially depend on their adult children migrating across the border to Thailand for low-skilled, low-paid, but readily available employment, such as in the domestic help sector. As such, for the people Chambers came to know in Hpa-an, the value of education beyond high school was contested between the generations. Many young people saw tertiary education as an important pathway to career opportunities and cosmopolitan subjectivities. Their parents worried it could be an expensive distraction from the more immediate concerns of earning money, which young people could do as low-skilled migrant workers in Thailand. Chambers spoke to young people who felt conflicted between cosmopolitan dreams of personal growth through education, career and travel, and moral obligation to contribute to the family economy through unfulfilling labour that would provide little opportunity for upskilling. Chambers analyses this in light of the concept of eudaimonic wellbeing—a process of living a good life through ‘fulfilling one’s virtuous potential’ (Chambers 2021, 398).

Negotiating Independence and Obligation

This brings us to an important point in relation to this special issue. While the literature on youth transitions tends to view youth as a period of increasing independence in terms of financial resources, decision-making and mobility, ‘in a majority world context … young people negotiate and renegotiate their interdependence with their parents and siblings throughout the life-course’ (Punch 2002, 124). Indeed, for many families—especially poorer ones—investment in education is part of an ‘intergenerational contract’ in contexts of scant or non-existent social welfare provisions. The intergenerational contract is a form reciprocity, the ‘essence’ of which, as Naila Kabeer (2000, 465) explains:

is that parents look after their children when they are young and expect to be looked after by them in their old age: “looking after” in this context extends to emotional as well as material support. However, it is both socially and individually recognized that this inter-temporal asymmetry in the nature of the contract carries risks. Parents carry out their obligations in anticipation of future returns; children in recognition of past benefits. The contract therefore requires an act of faith on the part of parents who sacrifice current consumption for future security that their children will survive, will become economically productive and, most important, will be willing to honour their side of the contract when parents have become old and dependent.

This description may be too limiting though. In many families, reciprocity is not deferred until parents are elderly but, rather, is part of an immediate domestic moral economy.

My own contribution to this volume focuses on the Philippine island of Siquijor (Bulloch 2021). Siquijodnon have traditionally relied on small-scale fishing and farming. However, population pressure and increased demand for goods and services mean that children taking over parents’ livelihoods on the land is often not possible, or at best a supplementary strategy. New employment opportunities have opened beyond the island; however, entry into jobs often requires tertiary qualifications. For this and other reasons, parents and children alike invest great importance in education (Bulloch 2017).

A popular ‘life script’ for young Siquijodnon women holds that after tertiary study and before marriage, they will migrate for work, enjoy ‘independence’, save money for their future and send funds home to parents. Remittances to parents are often talked about in terms of a reciprocal and affective notion of debt. Many young people explicitly speak of their sense of duty to ‘pay back’ their parents before they marry. Within Filipino families, the ‘contract’ is often not only between parents and children but also between siblings. A common strategy is for parents to support the eldest child through tertiary studies, with the intention that he or she will gain employment and send money for the education of their next eldest sibling. Each sibling is expected to support the next born. In this way, the socio-economic status of the family as a whole may be improved.

This strategy, though, is fragile. Threats to it include pregnancy and marriage. For example, on Siquijor, marriage represents a change in obligations away from parents and siblings (such as sending remittances) and towards building one’s own family. As such, parents fear that their children will marry ‘too soon’ and frequently ban daughters from having boyfriends while in college. At the same time, the delay in the average age of marriage due to education and employment, and young people’s greater mobility, opens new possibilities for courtship and pre-marital relationships. Contributing to this is the wide circulation of media and consumerist discourses emphasising the individual, self-actualisation and courtship based on personality, preference and love (Hirsch & Wardlow 2006; Mankekar & Schein 2012). Intergenerational conflict over the timing of romantic relationships is common.

In this context, I consider the respective ‘weight’ that individual versus familial-relational goals hold for the young women I interviewed (Bulloch 2021). Most expressed desires for more autonomy. However, they also maintained a deep sense of obligation to parents, siblings and other kin. In fact, pressure to support the parental family is heightened relative to earlier generations. Rather than ideals of autonomy replacing those of relationality, I argue that both discourses have intensified. There is not only a greater expectation that young women will exercise autonomy and enjoy a consumer lifestyle but also more active pressure for them to support the economic interests of the larger group. In this context, conforming to the ‘ideal’ script for transitions to adulthood can be like walking a tightrope.

Marriage and Agency

While marriage is often delayed and fertility rates are declining across Asia (OECD 2019), matrimony and parenthood remain important aspirations and signifiers of full adulthood for many people across the continent (for example, Nilan et al. 2016; Becker 2021; Bulloch 2021; McCarthy 2021). Marriage and parenthood may signal dramatic shifts in expected subject positions, responsibilities and forms of agency and, for this reason, can also be looked on with ambivalence by young people and/or parents. On Siquijor, while parents may be concerned that their children will marry ‘too soon’ (thereby jeopardising the intergenerational contract), they are often also anxious that their children will not marry soon enough. Residents told me that around 25 was the ‘right’ age for a woman to marry and, indeed, societal pressure to marry increases steadily thereafter. This means that women have a relatively brief ‘window’ in which to achieve the ideals of successfully completing studies, working, saving and sending money home before marriage.

Pressures, both similar and different, play out in Nepal. Margaret Becker’s article (this issue) centres on a group of unmarried, high-caste women in their early- to mid-twenties in Kathmandu. While their mothers had little formal schooling, these women were studying towards postgraduate qualifications at a public university. In Nepal, education is highly valued and is seen as a key pillar of the nation’s efforts towards ‘development’. Indeed, in Nepal international concepts of development and modernity—which have merged with local categories in the notion of bikás—are salient. International agendas have brought discourses on women’s rights and agency into popular circulation, and state discourses have emphasised the intergenerational duty of women to become literate and educated as a means to enable progress for families and society as a whole (think the ‘girl effect’). For the middle-class women in Becker’s focus groups, English words like ‘empowerment’, ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’—promoted through education, the development industry and the media—were part of their everyday lexicon. They saw themselves as fairly independent (especially compared to their mothers, who married in their teens or younger) and were planning careers.

Yet, this cohort of women understood their cosmopolitan subjectivities as constrained by a script and parental desires that envisioned them soon taking more family-oriented roles as wives and mothers. All the women were expecting to marry, and marriage was important to them; all also knew that their parents were subject to intense social pressure to ensure daughters marry at around 25 years of age; and all were conscious that according to high-caste notions of the ‘good woman’, a married woman’s life centres on the domestic sphere and she is subordinate to her husband. What is more, for many high-caste women in Kathmandu, marriages are arranged. The women Becker interviewed feared that through marriage they would be forced to abandon dreams of a career and even lose their ‘identities’. The women hoped that by first establishing careers, and if they had supportive husbands and parents-in-law, they would have more agency, including to continue their careers. So, it was with deep disappointment that they began to find their parents arranging their marriages, with little or no consultation with them, as if their status as empowered women had dissolved. Again, Becker’s article highlights how discourses of autonomy and obligation sit in tension, and (a point I return to below) how ideals of self-authored biographies meet structural constraints.

Between Children and Elders

As women become parents themselves, their obligations may become more complex—extending both to their parents and their own children. New parents may shift the way they express their aspirations—orienting their hopes towards their children. Indeed, when I asked Siquijodnon men and women about their hopes for the future, ‘I want my children to finish their studies’ was, overwhelmingly, the most common answer.

Based on a review of ethnographic studies across East, South-East and South Asia, Elisabeth Croll (2006) points out that resource flows from parents to children are on the rise, ‘as the former seek to take advantage of greater educational and employment opportunities for the younger generation and set new priorities and aspirations for their children’ (Croll 2006, 446). Costs of raising children are growing (due to, for example, improved schooling), parents are investing in children for longer, and they are investing in girls as well as boys. The ethnographic studies Croll reviewed show ‘the escalating costs of raising children frequently depleted or took up a disproportionate portion of family income, savings or other resources, leaving little for other expenditures, including those for parents or grandparents’ (Croll 2006, 477). Such child-centred resource flows also extend to caregiving.

This is one of several threats to the intergenerational contract Croll identifies. Another is a ‘values gap’ between generations, as young people’s attitudes change in the context of globalisation and urbanisation. The studies she reviews suggest that younger generations have greater exposure to media and Western lifestyles, and that many increasingly value independence and de-emphasise obedience to elders (Croll 2006, 476). Demographic change also poses challenges to the intergenerational contract: nuclear households are increasing, average family size is declining, and kin are more often living further apart (including across international borders).

All of this would appear to indicate a weakening of the intergenerational contract. Yet evidence suggests it remains robust (Croll 2006). Young people continue to value filial obligation, often recognising and appreciating the enormous investment their parents have made in them.

Across the region there is a general ethnographic consensus that, far from an erosion or weakening of filial obligations due to the growing generation gap, filial support has remained strong and that in some instances the young are even more likely to express support for filial obligations than the old. (Croll 2006, 482)

The contract is, however, being renegotiated, with less emphasis on obedience and piety and more on voluntarily given care, affection and gratitude. The way people share resources is also changing: resources readily flow between households, meaning the rise of small conjugal households does not necessarily translate into a breakdown in exchanges within wider kin networks. The emphasis on both elder and youth care, though, means that the middle generation—with growing children and ageing parents—are increasingly squeezed ‘between the dual and conflicting demands of investing in children and supporting parents’ (Croll 2006, 447).

While investments in children’s educations and employment opportunities are not without self-interest, Jakimow (this issue) points to the costs such investments can have for the diversity of aspirations women may hold. She explains that in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, there is an ideal that middle-class women ought to direct their energies towards domestic responsibilities, including children’s education, at the expense of their own educational and career pathways.

Jakimow’s article focuses on women municipal councillors (parshads) and party workers in the city of Dehradun, who are in a period of ‘post-active motherhood’. In other words, these roughly ‘middle-aged’ women have children who are now largely independent, their domestic loads have lightened accordingly, and they are not yet experiencing the debilitating declines of ‘old age’. Jakimow (2021, 458) notes that ‘many consider post-active motherhood as a time when women enjoy greater freedom, autonomy and power’. Indeed, for the cohort she followed, post-active motherhood seemed to hold promise for new kinds of flourishing.

Most had long been politically active in their communities—for example, as protesters and party workers—juggling these activities with the enormous investment required to raise children and help them gain educational qualifications that would bolster the family’s socio-economic status as a whole. Now the women hoped to translate their long-term political involvement into more formalised career goals by contesting the 2018 elections. Yet they found their community and political work had either not garnered them enough social capital, or the wrong kind of social capital. They failed to win either the party ticket or the election.

Jakimow (2021, 467) points out that mothers do gain from the socio-mobility of their children, and ‘being a good mother is almost a pre-condition for being a successful female politician in India’. Yet the women’s investment in the next generation has constrained their own independent ambitions. As such:

intergenerational immobility for mothers can therefore be seen as the mirror consequence of intergenerational mobility for children … [T]hey are ‘immobile’ in the sense that their social achievement is limited to imagination only; they are not able to progress their aspirations in their entirety. (Jakimow 2021, 467)

Older Age and Adaption

In a time of flux, parents realistically worry whether their children will be willing or able to support them as they age, especially given that across the region most governments view family as the first line of old age resource provision and care (Croll 2006). Multigenerational households remain common across Asia,⁸ yet as grandparents enjoy better health into older age, and as they adjust to the labour demands faced by their children, they are also revising their expectations of the intergenerational contract. For example, among transnational Filipino families where parents have migrated for employment and are not co-resident with their children, grandparents are often primary carers for those children (for example, Christ 2017).

Tuen Yi Chiu and Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho (2020), meanwhile, have found that many Chinese older people support adult children working in Singapore by travelling internationally to temporarily act as caregivers for grandchildren. In a context where one-child policy means that the ratio of younger to older people is much lower than in the past, and where older people have better access to state entitlements than past generations, many see it as impractical and unnecessary for children to provide daily care and financial support to them in return. Furthermore, discourses on older adults’ independence and self-actualisation are growing in popularity in China. ‘Grandparent migrants in our study’, Chiu and Ho (2020, 4) state, ‘reinterpret the meanings and practices of filial piety and reciprocity by prioritising the well-being of the younger generation while emphasising the importance of independence, freedom and autonomy for their own aging pathways’.

As with much of the material above, this example highlights the importance of class and economic security in the ways intergenerational aspirations are oriented. Vincent—an elderly Filipino man I spoke to in his house, with its dirt floor and leaking roof—expressed deep bitterness that his children had not fulfilled their ‘side’ of the intergenerational contract. ‘The Lord blessed me that I was able to send my kids to school up to college’, he explained. Yet only one of his three children completed their qualifications. The son who did finish was offered a job on a cargo ship, but before he was due to embark his girlfriend fell pregnant and he felt he needed to stay. ‘I know that if only they had finished’, Vincent rued, ‘they would have become professionals and then maybe now we would have been able to eat from their salaries’.

Cruel Hope and Redreaming

‘It is important to keep in mind’, says Chambers (2021, 405), ‘the “cruel” potential of hope’. For while now, more than ever, diverse paths to ‘success’ seem possible, and discourses abound exhorting people to bootstrap themselves to better lives, and from every village and suburb there are examples of those who have ‘made it’, much can go wrong along the way, and often does. Dreaming is a risky project.

For parents and children alike, chance misfortune or structural constraints can disappoint dreams. Realities of class, caste, nationality, ethnicity, gender and sexuality conspire. ‘Mobility in imagination’ may meet ‘immobility in fact’ (Jakimow 2021, 458). For example, as Heather Switzer (2013, 356) explains of Maasai schoolgirls, they ‘want to be exceptional’ and have been taught to place faith in ‘self-will and self-discipline’, but ‘they live in contexts in which their desire for development (of self and society), despite neoliberal restructuring, is often trumped by the exigencies of economic vulnerability, political marginality, and recalcitrant gender regimes’.

Add to this the conflicted and conflicting nature of the multiple aspirations that many people hold, according to different ideals of a good and proper life simultaneously circulating in society such as notions of freedom versus filial obligation. To harbour contending aspirations is normal; to achieve them may be a feat. Furthermore, when aspirations are not shared across generations, dream fulfilment for one generation may mean disappointment for another. All of the articles in this special issue show people struggling with lives gone off-script. But they also show people rescripting—sometimes finding new goals, testing untried paths and even rewriting rules.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my co-contributors to this special issue—Margaret Becker, Justine Chambers, Tanya Jakimow and Annie McCarthy—for brainstorming thematic ideas for this introduction and commenting on the draft. Thanks also to Diana Glazebrook and Sverre Molland of TAPJA for their suggestions and support throughout the process of bringing together this special issue. Contributors to this volume are grateful to the Australian National University’s Gender Institute, which generously provided funding for a workshop at which the draft papers were reviewed and refined.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DE120100824].

Notes

1 Our focus on Asia was chosen to circumscribe a scope for analysis (rather than to assume cultural affinity across the region), and many of the issues we explore are also salient in other parts of the Majority World.

2 The theme of this special issue, and several of the papers, were originally developed as part of a panel on ‘Intergenerational Aspirations and Expectations’, organised by Hannah Bulloch and Tanya Jakimow, at the 2018 Association of Asian Studies of Australia conference.

3 The articles also focus on heteronormative contexts, though in some cases the contributors' larger research projects explored beyond these.

4 While we show the pivotal roles of girls and women in intergenerational plans, we do not systematically compare these with the (also important) roles of boys and men. We recognise that, in our ethnographic contexts, some of the issues we discuss are shared across genders, while others are gender specific. Future research or collections exploring similar themes in relation to boys and men are merited.

5 Organisations including the World Bank, the IMF, DFID and USAID followed suit, funding initiatives for adolescent girls.

6 While there is immense value in recognising the major contributions adolescent girls make to their families and communities, and in supporting their health and education, scholars have critiqued the girl effect from a range of angles (for example, Hickel 2014; Moeller 2018; Caron 2018; Koffman & Gill 2013; Switzer 2013). Among these is that the girl effect burdens an already overburdened demographic, it constructs girls and women in the majority world as in need of ‘saving’, and some of the major organisations promoting it, such as the World Bank and IMF, have been responsible for perpetuating major structural global inequalities (Hickel 2014). Girls moving ‘to the cities and take factory jobs’ also happens to align well with the interests of Nike, the sweat-shop dependent company that kicked off the campaign.

7 Scholarship on youth transitions has attracted critique for implying a linear and singular passage from childhood to adulthood, and for appearing to reduce youth to a state of in-between, rather than a distinctive life-stage in its own right, which young people themselves may not characterise in terms of transition (Skelton 2002, 103; Langevang 2008, 2040; White 2016, 5). Indeed, what age ranges even correlate with ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’ varies based on context. Many scholars, nonetheless, continue to find the concept useful, in part because it draws attention to a constellation of changing life dimensions while not presupposing what such changes look like in a given context.

8 In Nepal approximately 20 percent of households include both members aged under 15 and members aged 60 and over, for Myanmar the average is 17 percent, and for the Philippines 15 percent (UN 2017).