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Purpose: To explore emotional support, daily housework assistance, and economic support for older adults provided by the Vietnamese family within the context of the impacts of socio-economic, demographic, and other factors.

Methodology: (1) The researchers used data from censuses taken from 1989 to 2019; national surveys of Internal Migration, Labor and Employment and other topics; and recent large sample sociological surveys (2) adapted a modified Diamond Care Model (Ochiai, 2009) to analyze effects of the characteristics of older adults; and of the country’s laws, policies, and socio-economic changes, on the families’ caregiving activities supporting the older adults.

Findings: The family is still the most important institution providing care for older adults in Viet Nam. Most older people live with their children and see this as an age-old security solution despite differences related to lifestyles and interests. However, when the average number of working-age people per older person decreases, as older adults live longer, household sizes are smaller, and there is increased large migration, the demand for non-family caregiving for older adults will increase. Since social services to help meet this demand are limited, the traditional family support system for the elderly in Viet Nam will face many challenges as families try to assure the quality of care needed in the very near future.

Value: This chapter shows systematically a relationship between elderly care in the Vietnamese family and socio-economic, demographic, and associated factors based on comprehensive data sources. The results can help us think about how to create an appropriate future model for taking care of older adults in Viet Nam that combines the efforts of families and the support of comprehensive social policies by the community.

Although coresidence with children when one becomes old is an ideal in Chinese society, the drastic socio-economic development in Taiwan has brought some fundamental changes to living arrangements of the elderly population. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between family living arrangements and elderly health in Taiwan, given the secular trend of more elderly persons choosing to live with their spouse or to live independently.

The authors utilized panel data from the “1989 Survey of Health and Living Status of the Elderly in Taiwan” with follow-ups up to 2007 to examine how living arrangements of the elderly affect the risk of mortality using discrete-time hazard models. The authors stratified the analyses by the elderly’s preference to coreside with children, and examined whether the effects of living arrangement varied by age, controlling for sociodemographics, health status, health behaviors, and social relationships observed at the baseline.

The authors found that both the associations of living arrangements and coresidence preference with that mortality risk were largely weakened when controlling for other variables. Only among respondents expressing preference for coresidence were living arrangements associated with mortality risks, and these effects increased with age. For those who did not intend to live with children, the authors found no evidence suggesting living arrangements were associated with mortality risks. The dynamics of living arrangements among the elderly and elderly care policies in Taiwan are discussed for further research.

To the authors knowledge, no previous research has examined living arrangements and mortality risks with respect to coresidence preference.

Concern with the size of poverty in any nation leads to a broader question: What does it mean to be poor in a rich society? More specifically, what does it mean for a family, and particularly its children, to live in a state of poverty within a prosperous society? To begin to answer these questions, we must look at poverty in the context of its opposite, plenty. As members of modern societies, we use a wide range of goods and services to effect our participation in social relations and to create and sustain our sense of social identity. The mainstream standard of living defines the average American's family resources that fall sufficiently short of the mainstream as deprivation, precarious subsistence, exclusion – in short, poverty. Our common cultural understanding is that we cannot play our social roles or participate meaningfully in our communities without the basic material resources necessary to carry out our activities. One way or another, each of us has to “make a living” in order to “have a life.” The roles and activities that define participation are age-graded – child, teenager, young adult, mature adult, senior citizen. For any one age, these common cultural understandings allow people to pass judgment on their own rank and that of others in a continuum from destitution to unseemly affluence, based on what kind of participation they can effect.

High rates of union dissolution and repartnering among parents means that today’s youth are increasingly likely to spend some time living with a stepparent. Although family structure has been linked to adolescent well-being, most work has compared those in stepfamilies with those in intact families, so it is not clear which aspects of stepfamily life are more or less consequential for adolescent behaviors among those exposed to a co-residential stepfamily.

To examine stepfamilies more closely, we focus explicitly on youth who had ever lived with a stepfather using mother and child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (n = 1,754). We specifically explore how structure and stability, timing of exposure, and sibling configuration influence risk-taking, operationalized as sexual debut and drug use at age 16.

We find that timing and sibling composition seem to be unrelated to risk-taking, but stepfamily structure and stability are highly salient. Adolescents currently in a cohabiting stepfamily and those who have experienced the dissolution of a prior stepfamily are more likely to engage in sex (and sometimes use drugs) than their counterparts living with only their stepfather in a married-parent family.

The findings highlight the importance of stability, more so than structure, timing, or sibling configuration, in understanding adolescent risk-taking. The results provide further evidence that children in stepfamilies have unique vulnerabilities and opportunities for resilience, and should be evaluated independently from samples of children from intact families to avoid a deficit approach in modeling and theorizing.

This study, based on data from the National Survey of Families and Households, confirms normative preference for nuclear households across all cohorts and racial/ethnic groups throughout this century. However, a noteworthy minority (about 30%) did live with grandparents at some time during their childhood. Living with grandparents as well as having a grandparent live in one's parental household were somewhat more prevalent during the 30's and 40's, indicating that extended households may have been formed in response to the Depression and especially World War II. There also is a significant effect of nuclear family structure: living arrangements with grandparents predominate among those who did not live with both parents at some time during their childhood. The data also suggest that it is important to differentiate between grandparental living arrangements that are oriented toward the care of the grandchildren and those arrangements that imply care for the grandparent: the former arrangement predominates among Blacks, whereas the latter is more common among Whites. During the past decade there has been increased interest in extended family living arrangements and particularly in households including grandparents and/or grandchildren. This interest reflects several demographic trends during the latter part of this century, especially increases in divorce and in parental problems (drugs, AIDS) that preclude parents from taking care of their own children as well as increases in longevity and in the survival of frail elderly, many of whom come to live with their adult children. Census data offer information on the prevalence of extended family arrangements at any one point in time, but they are insufficient to estimate a person's lifetime “risk” of living with grandparents and provide only limited information on the duration of such living arrangements. Data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) include information not only on whether individuals ever lived with their grandparents but also on the type and the duration of such arrangements. Based on this data set, this article assesses trends in living arrangements with grandparents, and variations in these trends by race and childhood family structure.

Conventional consumer equivalence scales measure the cost of children (and other household living arrangements) but not their benefits. Since many people choose to have children, these costs must be outweighed by other benefits. This paper considers these issues of demographic choice and explores the relevance of consumer equivalence scales to the broader welfare questions associated with tax/transfer policies and poverty and inequality measurement. The paper concludes that in contrast to conventional methods of measuring poverty and inequality, there is a case for the use of different equivalence scales for adults and children in the same household. Though the adults may have chosen their lower living standard in exchange for the “joys of parenthood”, the children have made no such choice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons that children migrate without a parent.

The economic components of the answer to this question are considered by examining the correlates of out‐migration for children under 15 whose mothers reside in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India.

In this data 1 million children appear to have migrated away from home. On average 3 per cent of living children aged 5‐14 in the communities are away from home, but the fraction of out‐migrant children ranges between 0 and 29 per cent. The data are found to be consistent with a classical view of migration: children on average appear to migrate out of competitive, rural child labor markets for net financial gain.

The costs of migration are important. Children are less likely to migrate from more remote locations. Children are less likely to migrate from locations where child wages are higher. Overall, patterns of child migration away from their mothers look similar to what other researchers have observed in adult populations in different social and economic contexts.

The paper considers the determinants of child migration

Children who are refugees and who live with disabilities are among the most at-risk groups for marginalization due to compounded disadvantages from the intersection of risk factors such as refugee status and disability status. Despite their high risk, there is no systematic data collected on this group and scant literature on the topic contributing to a feeling of invisibility. The purpose of this study is to better understand the experiences of Syrian refugee families with children living with disabilities.

The authors conducted a narrative inquiry into the experiences of two Syrian refugee families with children living with disabilities. Narrative inquiry is a way to understand experience as a storied phenomenon.

In attending to the families’ stories of their experiences across time, place and social contexts, two narrative threads resonated across their experiences including waiting and a struggle for agency as well as disruption and continuity.

Narrative inquiry does not produce generalizable results but, rather, gives insight into the unique experiences of individuals.

To understand the complexities of the experience of a refugee family with a child living with disabilities, attending to their lived and told stories is essential.

Drawing on a view of children's and teachers’ identities as stories to live by, the authors use one field text, taken from a year-long narrative inquiry, to show how children's and teachers’ stories to live by interact with milieu and subject matter in classroom curriculum making. Tensions around negotiating a curriculum of lives are identified as children's stories bump against teachers’ stories. Three children's stories to live by are represented through a set of images in found poetry. We return to the curriculum-making moment with wonders about each child's evolving stories to live by in relation with the particular subject matter. We outline four methodological dilemmas and ethical dilemmas encountered in studying multiple participants’ experiences nested within social, cultural and institutional narratives.