Family Support for the Elderly in a Javanese City-- A Mixed Blessing?

by Jeremy Evans, Ph.D. *

Investigations into household economics and into poverty in particular commonly assume that money, goods and food are evenly shared among household members. The few studies carried out to date which could have put this assumption to the test have shown that this may, in fact, have little foundation in truth. Meredith Edwards' work on Australian families x and Caroline Biedsoe's on households in Sierra Leone 2 are cases in point. Edwards concluded from her research that, in many cases wives could be said to have a lower standard of living than their husbands with some of the women existing at a very low standard of living indeed. Bledsoe found that mothers' care for the offspring from successive partners varied markedly with the children of the mothers ~ current partners tending to receive notably better treatment than those of any previous unions. Although the assumption of equity within the household may have to be retained regardless of this contrary evidence for purposes of macro-analysis, this evidence indicates that macro-analysis of household economics and poverty may often need to be complemented by investigation at the micro level.

Analysis of data and observations collected during a nine-month period of field-work in the city of Solo (population, 1981: 540,000) in Central Java, Indonesia during 1981 strongly suggest that older men and women who lack financial resources of their own may often find themselves in similar circumstances to Australian wives and children in Sierra Leone. Many of the older people questioned in our study were living with relatives in extended families. These findings raise questions about the continued capacity of the family in contemporary circumstances to act as the major provider of economic, as well as social support, for its older members, as it is expected to do throughout much of the less developed world.

Most Third World governments have established old-age income support schemes of various types, but the coverage which these provide is more often than not limited, variously to salaried workers, government employees, urban residents or other sub-groups of the population, while levels of support for the great majority of recipients are minimal. In Indonesia, only a little over one-tenth of the labor force, corresponding in large part to government workers, belong to old-age income schemes.

Our findings arose from a sequence of statistical analysis which progressively reveal the nature of the correlations between the body mass index (BMI) and a number of

*Dr. Evans is with the Human Sciences Program at the Australian National University in Canberra.

UN Photo: Andrea Brizzi

different economic variables. The BMI is calculated by dividing a person's body weight by the square of their height, and is probably the most popular measure of body shape because it correlates reliably with other, independent measures of adiposity or fatness)

A couple of studies of large samples of Australian adults have shown the BMI to be significantly correlated also with two indicators of socioeconomic status (SES), decreasing to a definite if slight extent as the latter increases. 4 Our own findings on older Javanese show the BMI to be significantly correlated with several different measures of income but at considerably higher levels than for the Australian and in the reverse direction, so that the BMI here rises, and does so steeply, with increases in income. In the generally more favorable economic circumstances of Australia, it seems that people of higher SES may be more inclined to eat more healthy food and to watch their weight, while the level of a person's income in Java may be influencing how much can be eaten in crude quantitative terms.

The Javanese story becomes even more interesting when one moves on to ask which of the various measures of income relates most strongly to the BMI. We collected data which enabled us to calculate three sets of income: 1) the respondent's own individual income, 2) the income of their household, and 3) the amount of household income which the respondent was managing.

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It turns out that, for the men, individual income correlates more highly with the BMI than either o f the other two kinds. This result is chiefly due to the outstandingly high correlation of income from work with the BMI. It is possible, of course, that the older men who were still working tended to be healthier, and that healthier people tend to have higher BMI. Since our survey also collected a broad spectrum of information on health, which enables us to calculate indices describing five different aspects of respondents' health status, we were able to test this possibility and had to reject it. The only explanation which remains is that the older men 's work income was contributing in some fashion to their access to food within the household and thus to their nutritional status.

For the women, the outstanding correlate of the BMI is neither individual nor household income, but the managed income and, in particular, the contributions which other people were making to that income. As in many other parts of the world and probably throughout Java, the women in Solo reported t h a t they were the managers of their household budgets more often than did the men. (It is worth noting that many more of the women than the men were receiving remittances f rom their adult children and other relatives, but that these were counted for the purposes of our analysis as individual income, and thus do not surface as an important correlate of women's nutritional status.)

Other analyses revealed that consistent with the importance for the women of managed income, the identity of the person who was responsible for managing the household budget is another strong correlate of the BMI. Thus, for both men and women, if the respondent of their spouse was manager, the respondent 's BMI tended to be high while, if anyone else including an adult child or their spouse was, the respondent's BMI tended instead to be low.

This result reaches statistical significance for the women though not for the men.

Seventy percent of the men in the statistical sub-sample, compared to thirty percent of the women, were living in nuclear families, i.e., living with a spouse or other family member, but not with any married progeny or siblings. (Co- residence with parents or with one or more married progeny or siblings yielded a compound household according to the classification system which we used.) More women than men were living in compound households or on their own and it is in these situations, when the respondent is no longer manager of her own household, that the BMI of the women, in particular, reaches a minimum.

These f'mdings draw attention not only to the need to complement macro-analyses of household economics and poverty with micro-studies, but also, and more importantly, to the parlous circumstances of a massive number of women, as well as some lesser number of men, who are today moving towards old age or have already become elderly in Third World societies which still espouse the increasingly discredited belief that the family should provide for its own in old age.

References

1. Edwards, Meredith, Financial arrangements within households: Canberra: National Women's Advisory Council, 1981.

2. Bledsoe, Caroline, paper for "Health Transition Workshop," Canberra: National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, 1989.

3. Keys, Ancel et al, Journal of Chronic Disability, 25: 1972, 329-343.

4. English, Ruth M. and $tan Bennett, Journal of Food and Nutrition 42 (1), 1985, 2-7; personal communication, 1989.

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made possible by reasonably generous pensions and health and social services. The incidence of three-generation famifies has declined considerably during this period, made possible by enhanced public sector provision and the stigma attached by earlier generations to accepting public sector assistance has sharply receded.

While, for some, such data indicates an inexorable weakening in family structure, other data point to the persistence of considerable contact and mutual help between generations, based perhaps more on emotional ties than economic necessity. (Aldring & Eldre, No. 1/89)

�9 German gerontologists, Ursula Lehr and Joachim Wilbers, found, too, that persons in caretaker positions vis-a-vis older parents--usually daughters without siblings--were almost unanimous in stating that they did not expect or would never

accept the same kind of assistance from their own children. Often these caretakers were themselves approaching their older years and experiencing health problems. Rarely, did caretakers turn to social services, however, either out of ignorance or the refusal of elderly parents to be looked after by "strangers". Caretakers who maintained relationships outside the family and who had experienced positive relationships with their parents did find their caregiving less onerous than others.

Although the number of three- generation households and even the number of years spent in two-generation households is on the decline in the Federal Republic of Germany, women, particularly in the 40-50 age group, are experiencing an "accumulation of crises" as a result of their placement in four and even five-generation families. Women of this age play the role not only of mother, mother-in-law and even

grandmother, but of daughter and daughter-in-law vis-a-vis elderly parents needing assistance and care. And because of the heavier responsibilities assumed by womenj they, rather than men, experience intergenerational conflicts, particularly with regard to children, more acutely. These, in fact, were found to increase with age.

The rejection of caregiving by their children on the part of today's caregivers leads Lehr and Wilbers to speculate that future generations of older persons may expe~ence less stress and have a better chance of aging in a state of physical and mental well-being as a resuh of reduced caregiving burdens. (Ursula Lehr and Joachim Wilbers, "Les femmes dans les

P ~ �9 1 , families ~ plusieurs generation, GErontologie et Soci~eP, No. 48, 1989)

4 Ageing International December 1989