Comment by monideas

AFAICT this is a value in most cultures in all directions. I think "the west" invented pensions, social security and medicaid (or whatever you call it in your country) so parents nor children had to plan on caring for the elderly when they had trouble working (and with white collar jobs, that may be a long time).

Multi-generational, western (American) guy here: caring for the older generations is a core value to everyone I know and to me. We just don't _have_ to. My mom has money, can drive, owns a nicer house than I do. So, it's really only for 'values' that I check in on her and handyman for her whenever I can. In fact, for the latter, I cause her more problems than I fix.

Western societies aren't behaving the way they do around family and care issues because they have a grand plan, but because they don't have one.

In particular, the public is wildly uneducated about the interdependencies they implicitly rely on and take for granted, until they get old one day and realize the negligence.

The general idea in the US is, you have to prepare for yourself, in the EU the premise is, the state prepares for you. Both are oversimplifications that don't really work more often than people want to admit.

This isn't about some fundamental East/West attitude difference. From time immemorial it was like that in the West too, the change came with the late 19th century and mainly the 20th century when government took on the role of caretaker with pensions, welfare and various government transfers, reducing interpersonal dependencies, and allowing more atomized lifestyles.

Personal context: I am an American of European descent, with most of my ancestors having arrived between 1880 and 1950 (pretty solidly "Western"). Extended family is broadly well-off enough to not be financially in need in retirement.

Observation: Sooner or later, all of our family's elders have wound up cared for by a mix of children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. Even those who didn't have children. We're an ornery bunch, so quite a few stubbornly insisted they didn't need anyone, yet eventually they did. Care often came at an inconvenience to those providing it, but one way or another, in one form or another, care was given. I can only think of one person from my extended family who wasn't cared for by the younger generations in his final years.

Speculation: The average number of children in my extended family hovers around three, and most of us are in a few geographic clusters (not the same city, but still a cluster). Perhaps if the average litter was between one and two, and/or we were more spread apart, we may have slipped into line with that stereotype?

It's not really west vs east. It had been a core value in "western" cultures too, and is changing in "eastern" cultures as we have this discussion.

The change seems to have more to do with the atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite. Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional, career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions, and that necessity then supersedes the actual relationships and responsibilities that had traditionally been taken for granted and free from accounting.

It's a death spiral towards alienation that we stumbled into in modernity and need to collectively address, not a cultural divide between east and west.

The obvious book recommendation here is: Joseph Henrich: The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.

southern europe, small villages.

we take care of our own. It's very much part of our core values.

To add to what others have noted:

To some extent, yes, it is unfortunate that Western culture has abandoned that cultural value.

However, it's also been incredibly liberating to a great many people.

When it's a cultural value to take care of your parents when they are elderly, to the point of shaming adult children who refuse to do so, it lends itself all too easily to abuse. And there are a lot of abusive parents out there. This is particularly true among queer people, who have only recently (generationally speaking) been able to be out in a widespread manner.

Furthermore, for the current generations of elderly and their children, the chances are higher than ever that the elderly parents have much, much more in the way of resources to take care of themselves than their children have.

The atomization of our society is a genuine problem, and we need to find some good society-level solutions for it. But socially demanding that children care for their parents, no matter how awful those parents were to the children (or still are!) is not something that we should bring back.

Christianity has always preached and required this mutual support and interdependence. It has an archaic name: "alimentation".

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01312b.htm

But we in the U.S.A. have cast off the chains of interdependence, and adopted the Enlightenment ethos of rugged individualism and consumerism that defines American values. Who needs grandparents, or husbands, or family support when we can train and pay mercenaries to care about us! All praise, glory and power be to our Constitution!

Marriage is the highest form of social engineering, it is an observed fact that it is the primary driver of the civilizing process in human history.

Its absence and the resultant breakdown is being observed in real-time, it should be no surprise that the degradation of society from its absence takes a long time to be felt and it will take a long time to repair this error.

In practice that group is small though and neglible among non elderly.