Suchergebnisse

Filial piety or China's tradition of taking care of one's aging parents continues to evolve as evidenced by a growth in nursing home residents in Shanghai. The reason for this increase in institutional care remains unclear and calls for an exploration on how these elders and their children decided to institutionalize. More specifically, understanding the communication dynamics between generations when they decide to institutionalize would provide insights into whether and how the decision is mutual. Using a phenomenological approach, this study draws on power relations to examine intergenerational communication dynamics during the decision-making process around institutionalization. Twelve matched dyads of elderly residents and their children participated in face-to-face, in-depth interviews in a government-sponsored nursing home in Shanghai (N = 24). Both generations reported how they proposed to institutionalize, initiated intergenerational communication, and finalized the decision, as well as how they reacted to the other generation's stance during the decision-making process. The findings reveal that more children made the decision for their elderly parents (decision-making power) than did their frail parents for themselves. Adult children's stronger power evoked their elderly parents' ambivalent feelings of filial piety. Older adults were simultaneously disappointed about and obliged to their children's decision to institutionalize. Furthermore, in the power trajectory, one difference may exist that the children's end matches up with tangible caregiving resources, whereas the elders' stay at the emotional end. The ongoing aging of Chinese baby boomers requires future research on longitudinal caregiving trajectories between generations. This study also illuminates the needs for comparisons with caregiving expectations between generations to inform the development of long-term care infrastructure in urban China.