As China faces accelerating population aging, intergenerational support and reciprocity within families have drawn increasing scholarly attention. Using panel data from the China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey (CLASS) between 2018 and 2023, this study empirically examines the effects of parental downward intergenerational support on children’s upward reciprocity and the mechanisms underlying this relationship. The findings indicate that parental downward support significantly promotes children’s upward reciprocity, primarily by enhancing elderly support expectations and the frequency of intergenerational contact.
Different forms of downward support exhibit distinct effects: economic support more effectively elicits economic reciprocity from children, whereas parental household assistance and grandchild care primarily drive children’s upward household assistance. Heterogeneity analyses show that these positive effects are significant across all groups, with larger estimated effects in rural households and lower-income groups. Confucian cultural intensity further amplifies the positive association between intergenerational support and reciprocity.
Moreover, greater parental support may coincide with lower perceived care from children, suggesting a potential mismatch between instrumental support and emotional response. This study advances the understanding of intergenerational resource flows within families and offers theoretical and practical insights for promoting intergenerational harmony and informing relevant policy interventions. The author has no acknowledgements to declare.
School of Government, University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China The author declares no competing interests. This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Chinese-style intergenerational support: reciprocity or exploitation?.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
