Social Ageism in Child-Centric Attitudes and Futures of Care

Amidst an increasing attention to unpacking the diversifying and dynamic forms of care, I draw attention to contrasts between different forms of care work, namely childcare and eldercare, across the culturally diverse societies of Singapore and Taiwan (in East Asia) and Canada (in North America). I argue that despite their significant cultural differences in the historical institutions of welfare policy and family care, there are common shifts toward a child-centric attitude of care organization in which intensive parenting (through education as care labour) and social ageism in care planning and policy outcomes coexist. The majority of care work studies tends to analyse childcare and eldercare in the family/household context as an individual category and separate from each other. But situating the wider trends of dialectical child-centric and ageist tendencies in care relations within modernity as a general ethical dilemma is an important conceptual move for care work scholars to challenge the dominant instrumental constructs of human valuation. I draw on a few semi-structured interviews with middle-aged working professionals in Singapore, Taiwan, and Canada who are adult children and parents of young children; members of the “sandwich generation” with multiple (and often conflicting) care obligations. Intriguingly, a common observation is what social observers of Chinese families have termed “descending familalism”, which refers to an inversion of traditional values of elderly respect and veneration. Singapore’s and Taiwan’s Confucian culture stands apart from Canada’s liberal or individualist ideals, for instance, in the former’s reluctance to accept the idea of elderly institutionalisation - sending one’s parents to a nursing home is socially stigmatised and regarded as an unfilial act. Nonetheless, I identify a connecting thread of competitive academic culture and intensive parenting in childcare that exerts ageist effects at the interpersonal and household level. Moving forward, trends of social ageism deserve greater analytical scrutiny.