Institutional and Cultural Perspectives in Elder Care in Rural Vietnam

Trần Thị Minh Thi

doi:10.53098/wir032019/01

Authors

Trần Thị Minh Thi Tran T. Minh Thi, PhD, Associate Professor, Director General, Institute for Family and Gender Studies, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, 27 Tran Xuan Soan St., Hanoi, Vietnam https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6041-4502

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53098/wir032019/01

Keywords:

elder care, Vietnam, care provision, care diamond, culture, institution

Abstract

Traditional norms of filial piety in Asian societies, including Vietnam, emphasise care roles of children for their elderly parents. In particular, caregiving is often the responsibility of women, who are increasingly migrating and participating in the labour market, leading to an increasing withdrawal of family caregivers from caring for their parents. In collaboration with local mass organisations and stakeholders, Vietnam is enhancing institutional care and changing the balance of care towards home, community-based services and marketisation to provide alternative care options for its elderly population. The community is playing a key role in emotional support for the elderly. Taking into account the traditional Confucian-influenced family structure, the responsibility for elderly care is still a family matter. Using a dataset from a collaboration survey of 307 elderly people in 2017, the paper aims to examine and analyse roles, challenges and difficulties of family, community, private and public social services and policy in care provision to the elderly and the gaps in it, to understand the processes of the reconstruction of those formal and informal sectors in order to bear the increasing care responsibilities, and the ways they provide care to the elderly and the linkages with policies and institutional in Vietnam, using the care diamond model. The paper also raises issues of increasing left-behind elderly people in the rural areas and identifies various initiations to sustain Asian cultural values, family relationships, and continuous development of care policies and potential implications in developing a better care mode for the elderly.

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