Are there benefits to having more children for the oldest-old elderly? A longitudinal analysis on successful aging in China

ABSTRACT

Perhaps the most significant cultural difference regarding successful aging is that in western countries it is associated with self-sufficiency, while the Chinese focus is on the availability of support from their children. This study uses five waves from the CLHLS to examine the impact of having children on successful aging. Random-intercept Poisson regressions show that having more living children is positively related to successful aging. Co-residence with children does not contribute to better successful aging; but having children living nearby has a positive effect. Therefore, findings from this oldest-old study show that support from children is important in an individual’s aging process. Policies should be adjusted to prepare for the future decrease in support from children.

KEYWORDS:

• Successful aging
• children
• living arrangements
• China

Acknowledgement

Data used for this research was provided by the Centre for Healthy Aging and Development Studies, Peking University. The authors thanked for Hao Xu and Son Nghiem for comments on this paper. We also thanked for the audiences in the 14th Western Economic Association International Conference (Newcastle, Australia) for comments on the first draft of this paper; and the audiences in the 3rd Labour Economist Forum (Huhhot, China) for comments on the second draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yulei Weng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2138-773X

Dan Li http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0081-8139

Notes

1 Source: 2017 World Population Prospects, United Nations.

2 49% of the respondents in the sample reported that they had had children who were no longer alive.

3 The other 9 provinces have been excluded from the sample due to biased age reporting (Zeng, Poston, Vlosky, & Gu, 2008).

4 The reason for using the score of 18 as the cutoff is due to a significant amount of illiteracy among the elderly Chinese (Zhang, 2006).

5 “Children” in this study refers to biological children.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Northwest University Social Science Research Funding (19XNFH015).