An Indian parable recognises that having children does not automatically guarantee care for elderly parents. That parable goes as follows:
An elderly man, a landowner, has two sons. The boys take good care of the old man who has yet to make over his land to them. They vie with each other in caring for him, each hoping to gain an advantage over the other.
One day he formally passes on the estate to his sons. Their attitude towards the old man changes. Now that they have all his material goods, they become careless and heedless of his welfare.
The old man is distressed. He tells his tale of woe to a visiting friend, who says he will visit again the following day and bring with him several tied bags filled with stones.
He will leave the bags with the old man who will lock them securely away in his room. The sons will soon inquire about their contents. The old man will say that his friend has just repaid a long-standing and substantial debt.
The old man did as his friend advised. His sons, now believing that the father had again substantial assets to distribute, changed their tune and were once more loving and caring offspring. The old man lived happily for many more years before he died.
Only then did the sons discover they had been tricked. Both the elderly and the young pose problems for our modern day world.
The developed world places a low value on its elderly population. At the same time, birth rates are low in the developed world and, in most cases, are significantly less than death rates. On the other hand, Third World society affords a distinct and valued role to the elderly population.
Third World countries also have high birth rates, far greater than their poor economies can sustain. In order to alleviate these various problems, it is necessary to (a) understand how parents decide on the number of children to have; (b) decide what are appropriate and useful roles for the elderly and how these can be achieved.
There is a common feeling that the greater the number of children one has, the more secure one's old age will be, particularly in the event of debilitating infirmity. This old age/security hypothesis is the conventional explanation social science uses to account for the high birth rates in the Third World.
Social welfare support for the elderly is usually non-existent in the Third World and, it is argued, parents beget many children as a form of insurance policy which they cash in their old age.
There is now compelling evidence that this traditional old age/security hypothesis is seriously flawed. Having many children in the Third World may well offer increased security in old age, but it does so indirectly.
Having large numbers of children creates conditions in which elderly parents can play an important role in the economy and social life of their communities. It is this role which confers security.
There is nothing automatic or passive about this arrangement. The role of the elderly is an active working role. If they become so infirm that they cannot work, or if they have no attractive material assets, there is no guarantee of security. This is recognised in the cynical Indian parable.
Having large numbers of children who survive to adulthood inevitably leads to large numbers of grandchildren. The process of caring for grandchildren is greatly facilitated by the elderly grandparents. The grandparents' role becomes that of childminder, doing light chores, doing light agricultural work and possibly gathering food. The role of grandparents is of concrete benefit to the community and hence their role and security is assured.
The knowledge that security in old age depends on continuing to play an active and useful role is deeply ingrained in the culture of poor societies. Consequently, interventions aimed at reducing reproduction rates cannot succeed without taking this culture fully into account.
Interventions based on guaranteed social welfare payments to the elderly that will produce financial security but erode an active role will not succeed. In the short term, only those interventions that guarantee active roles for the elderly can succeed in reducing birth rates.
Western industrialised society does not afford a valuable and useful role to the elderly. Many people feel unwanted and of little use when they retire from work and when the children are grown up and gone away.
This is undesirable from many points of view, not least of which is the waste of talent that it represents.
In many ways elderly people are at the peak of their powers, e.g. in wisdom, judgment and maturity. There surely must be ways in which Western society can harness these talents and afford a valuable and useful role to the elderly.
Also, the elderly themselves can take steps to effect this change. The elderly now represent a large and potentially powerful political constituency if they wish to exercise this power on their own behalf.
A paradoxical equation is seen to operate when one considers birth rates, i.e. generally the more children that parents can afford to have, the fewer they have. Thus birth rates are high in the poor Third World countries but low in the developed industrialised countries. Within any country, the general trend is for poor people to have more children than rich people.
Declining birth rates in developed countries are causing an imbalance in the population age spectrum, leading to a preponderance of old and elderly. This imbalance is unhealthy for many reasons.
Much of society's infrastructure is financed and maintained by the taxes paid by the working population. Obvious problems will arise from a significant and simultaneous decline in the working population and a rise in the elderly population.
The suggestion has been made that people could be encouraged to have more children in the West by more actively involving grandparents with grandchildren. One mechanism for doing this would be to offer tax incentives to grandparents to set aside monies for their grandchildren, e.g. to be used to defray education expenses and so on.
At one stroke this would encourage people to have more children by reducing the financial burden of children on parents. It would also give grandparents a formal and useful role in an extended family.
William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry at UCC.