• Korea journal of population studies
• /
• v.34 no.3
• /
• pp.1-30
• /
• 2011

Recently increasing young adults have experienced serious economic difficulties in their transition to adulthood and so a great deal of parents have to help their children financially even well after children finish their schools. Utilizing the 2008 Social Survey, a nationwide representative survey collected by the Statistics Korea, this paper examines how children, mothers, and fathers think about parental support to adult children. Respondents of the 2008 Social Survey answer how much parents support economically to their children about the following four items: college education, graduation school education, spending money while searching for jobs, and marital preparation. Analyzing a sample of 1,727 high school students and their parents, I find that the three family members generally accept economic support to the above items as part of parental duties. Also comparisons of the three family members' attitudes indicate that they usually reach the consensus about the dutiful scope of parental support to adult children. Logistic regressions reveal that male teens and children with conservatism are more likely to believe in wider scope of parental economic duties. And parents who are on good terms with children and are high in educational and occupational levels are more willing to support adult children. I conclude with implications of the findings for intergenerational relationships.

• 한국노년학
• /
• v.37 no.1
• /
• pp.83-102
• /
• 2017

Expending on a life course perspective, this study explores the long-term and short-term reciprocity in parent-child relationships in Korean context. Since the reasons for providing filial support are believed to differ by gender, we focused on how a child's gender affects both types of reciprocity. Data were collected from middle-aged sons (N=726) and daughters (N=883) with at least one surviving parent. Logistic regression was then conducted in order to examine the relations between the support a child currently provides to parents and the current or previous support received from the parents. Dependent variables are financial and instrumental support that middle-aged child currently provide to the parents. The financial and instrumental support a child received from the parents within a year are included in the model as an independent variable to assess short-term reciprocity. The level of financial support a child has received during the transition to adulthood process is included in the model as a independent variable to explore long-term reciprocity. Result supports the existence of gender differences in the long-term reciprocity. Daughters provided instrumental support in response to the financial support that they had received from parents during the transition to adulthood process. However, for sons, this tendency was not found. When it comes to financial support, long-term reciprocity was observed neither for the sons nor for the daughters. Both sons and daughters are prone to provide financial support to the aged parents regardless of the level of financial support they had received during the transition to adulthood process. Short-term reciprocity was found both in sons and daughters. when they have been receiving a financial or an instrumental support from the aged parents within a year, they tend to provided instrumental support to the parents. This study shows that the aged parents still fulfill the reciprocal relationship to a certain degree. Secondly, we can conclude that the norm of reciprocity interplays with the norm of filial responsibility in contemporary Korea.