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Law on the care of aged parents off the mark

Newspapers report that ruling and opposition legislators are to review a draft of the Maintenance of Parents Law (子女奉養父母法), which would require children to care for their elderly parents. The current draft allows for imprisonment, detention and fines to be levied in order to force children to fulfill their filial duties.

If, however, lawmakers do not consider whether people have the will or the ability to care for elderly parents, possible results or advantages of the law will remain unclear. Basically, the fundamental spirit of the law as it is now proposed is to require that children fulfill their duty to provide their parents with a lifestyle equal to their own.

This also means that apart from the crime of abandonment (遺棄罪) in current civil and criminal law, the law guarantees the physical rights and interests of parents of an advanced age.

This item, however, points directly at the issue of whether children have the will to care for their parents, but neglects to examine the real and dynamic processes in individual households. It is probably necessary to investigate the reasons why children abandon their parents, rather than simply heap more social condemnation on them.

Therefore, tightly regulating the will of children to care for their parents will cause the symbolic meaning of the law to be far greater than its actual usefulness, since repaying one's parents has long been a family value shared by all Taiwanese. In the case of someone abandoning their parents, the restrictive force of popular morals is far greater than any formal legal regulations.

The moral expectations and social pressures on both children and parents should be the same, without discrimination.

In other words, while requiring children by law to care for their parents, it should be the natural course of things that demands on parental education (親職教育) and household responsibilities for parents also be improved.

Since the "will" issue is not the major problem in making Taiwanese care for their parents, the implementation of the law is in even greater need of another carefully thought out set of measures.

When individual factors such as human and capital investment are insufficient and professional competitive abilities come up short and when there are structural factors such as the economy being in a recession, lay-offs and unemployment -- how to care for elderly parents is not an issue of "will," but rather a realistic issue of "ability."

When the ability of children to financially support their parents is non-existent or insufficient, we need to consider how to provide policies regarding raising childrens' individual competitiveness, similar to vocational rehabilitation, vocational retraining, home rebuilding and social support.

Given the sharp drop in the number of children in Taiwanese society and the trend of people living longer, caring for parents is no longer a matter for heavy, moral preaching but an objective function of "ability."

Parents and children should not find themselves in a conflicting situation of opposing interests, but should recognize that theirs is a living relationship of mutual assistance and completion.

The consideration of this law should therefore not focus on negative legal sanctions, but should start out from an overall angle of family welfare and consider how to use various mechanisms to bind children and parents tightly together.

Wang Shung-ming is an associate professor of social welfare at Chinese Culture University.

Translated by Perry Svensson
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