Beyond Decline: Reconfiguring Family Support and the Social Wellbeing of Older Adults In Ageing Societies

Across ageing societies, narratives of family decline, such as falling fertility, kinlessness, and weakening norms of family obligation, frame older adults as increasingly exposed to isolation and disadvantage in health and wellbeing. Yet families are not simply disappearing; they are being reconfigured, and older adults actively adapt to these shifts. This session moves beyond decline narratives to ask how and to what extent older adults sustain social connection, wellbeing, and autonomy as traditional family support contracts and changes. We invite contributions examining how upward and downward intergenerational exchange, partnership change, migration, and changing kinship reshape the resources older adults can draw on, and how welfare states and community programmes fill in, or fail to fill, the gaps. We welcome work across different sociocultural contexts and across methods. Themes may include the dimensions of social wellbeing, sense of agency, intergenerational exchange in later life, ageing in culturally and linguistically diverse communities, and the interface between family, community, and policy in supporting inclusion. By drawing diverse studies into comparison, we aim to foster dialogue between scholars who study families and those who study ageing, and to lay groundwork for sustained comparative collaboration on the social wellbeing of older adults in transforming societies.