Somewhere along the way, care became conflated with co-residence.
The eligibility age for community care apartments was lowered recently from 65 to 55. They form part of a widening menu of independent-living options for seniors, alongside Age Well Neighbourhoods and “retirement kampungs” like Kampung Admiralty. Singapore’s first private assisted living home, Perennial Living, also just started operations, with facilities like a hydrotherapy pool and an all-day dining restaurant.
This has sharpened that tension. If we make it easier for older people to live apart from their families, will filial piety suffer?
Many seniors here still live with their families. But the direction of travel is unmistakable.
According to a 2019 MSF report, among households with an elderly member, the share that were three-generation households fell from about 35 per cent in 2000 to 21 per cent in 2017.
Singapore is not alone. Multi-generational living has declined for decades across Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and even in China.
In general, research highlights two main motivations for seniors choosing to live apart from their children. The first is the desire for freedom.
A woman who married young, raised children, then cared for her own ageing parents may reach her 70s never having once organised her days around herself. In her own place, among neighbours and familiar faces, she can finally set her own routine.
The second, however, is the wish not to burden one’s children. In a recent report by Singapore Management University’s Centre for Research on Successful Ageing on why older adults were interested in private assisted living facilities like nursing homes, more than half indicated that they did not want to trouble their children with their care needs.
This is easily misconstrued as an embarrassment about being dependent. But not wanting to lean on your children is not the same as not wanting them in your life.
Permission to disengage
Family ties here remain strong. According to the Family Trends Report, most respondents said they would provide financial, emotional and physical support to family members if needed.
But the trend of living apart poses an undeniable risk. Living apart means there will be fewer daily eyes on an ageing parent’s health and well-being, whether it is a sudden limp or a pill box that hasn’t moved all week.
There would also be fewer small, unplanned exchanges and conversations that come with living in the same house – replaced by a weekly visit that could be easy to postpone when work runs late.
The sharpest risk is that adult children read a parent’s move as permission to disengage. If mum has her own flat, her own subsidies and a care manager to call, it is easy to conclude that she is now somebody else’s responsibility.
A recent Duke-NUS review of local studies bears this out: Older people living alone receive markedly less financial and emotional support than those living with family. That is where filial piety erodes – not when the parent moves out, but when the family disengages.
Yet, compelling children to care for ageing parents by having them live together can do more harm than good.
As a guest in their child’s home, a senior may feel they have neither a say nor a use, particularly if they felt forced to live there due to deteriorating health. The adult child, meanwhile, might be willing but could be mid-career, stretched between generations, or ageing themselves.
We should also be honest about whose comfort living together serves – sometimes more a grown child’s wish to know mum is safe than anything mum wants.
Some may assume that living with family will automatically make a senior feel less lonely. But when a parent is uprooted from their home and neighbourhood and moved into a spare room, they lose familiar routines that having a family may not replace.
In a 2022 study of some 17,000 older Singaporeans, nearly four in five of those found to be socially disconnected were living with family; only about one in seven lived alone.
What matters more is a senior’s belonging to a community – whether as part of a close-knit family, with friends, or through religious, volunteer or exercise groups with meaningful connections.
Living apart, remaining connected
So if living together isn’t the answer, how can we ensure filial piety doesn’t suffer?
What prevents drift is not proximity, but intention. Filial piety at a distance means agreeing, explicitly, who does what: one child takes the medical appointments, another the finances. Someone arranges a standing weekday call – and a neighbour or the nearest active ageing centre holds a child’s phone number to call if something looks wrong.
When responsibilities are named and shared, a missed visit is noticed rather than excused.
Policymakers can also make showing up easier. Home care, respite services and caregiver leave already give working children room to stay involved without moving a parent in. These should be easier to use: more generous caregiver leave, respite and home-care places a family can book when they need them, and a single point of contact to coordinate services, so an adult child juggling work and young children is not left to assemble care alone.
Adult children can also show filial piety by planning ahead, listening to mum’s desires, and choosing the right living arrangement for her.
Caring for a parent is rarely one person’s task – and when support is needed, it’s usually a mix of formal and informal care, shared among children, siblings, a domestic helper – and backed by home care and an active ageing centre.
Rather than thinking about who mum should live with, families should think and plan early how they should arrange care around her – whether it is a community care apartment, remaining in her own home, or another option in the widening menu of senior housing.
So begin the conversation early – over a Sunday meal, rather than a hospital corridor. For families, that means asking a parent where and how they would want to live while they are well enough to say it, walking through the options together, then putting the arrangements in place.
Aunty Mary doesn’t need her children’s spare room. But she does need them nearby, present and connected. A generation that learns to love its parents in that way is not a weaker generation, but a wiser one.
Wee Shiou Liang is associate professor at the S R Nathan School of Human Development, Singapore University of Social Sciences, where he teaches and researches life-span development and gerontology.