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Parent-sitting the elderly in China

By: Institute for Social Inventions
Global Ideas Bank

As China continues to modernise, their family structure is changing with more children moving away from their parents than ever used to happen in the past. When this movement (due to employment, or generational differences) is added to the one-child policy in the country, the elderly are becoming increasingly isolated. A new service in Dalian, a city in the north-east of China, is solving the problem by employing retired teachers and students to visit the elderly for an hourly fee paid by the absent children. The Nice Nanny service now reaches more than 100 people in the city, and its success has prompted similar services to start up all over the country.

'The elderly people are delighted to have new visitors who they can regale with stories and show photographs to'Zhang Yuteng, who founded the service, says that the system works for everyone. The elderly people are delighted to have new visitors who they can regale with stories and show photographs to. The students or retired people who do the visiting get a bit of extra money and, often, some interesting company for a few hours. And the children are relieved from any pressure to be constantly visiting or in touch with a distant relative. As one such child put it, "When I visit my dad we have nothing to talk about. It is better to keep rotating new people in who haven't heard the stories before". Zhang allows a maximum of two visits to the same elderly customer, to avoid any complicated attachments being formed. And though it can never replace familial connections, services like Nice Nanny could see parent-sitting becoming more and more popular

Summarised from an article by Bay Fang, entitled 'The parent sitters club', in U.S. News & World Report (September 4th 2000), monitored for the Institute by Roger Knights.