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Yiqing Yang and Ming Wen

ents’ identity salience hierarchies, higher than their worker role (Thoits, 1992), accounting for a prom-
inent source of identity. Unlike most other social roles that have specified durations and clear boun-
daries, the parental role never ends. It may become even more important in late life because old age
is a life phase that frequently brings in negative changes in social roles (Pudrovska, 2009). Older
adults, for instance, often face the loss of some salient roles (e.g., the worker role, and possibly, the
spouse role) undertaken in earlier adulthood (Orth, Maes, and Schmitt, 2015).
It is the quality of experiences in social roles, however, rather than role occupancy per se, the
number of roles, or the amount of time spent in a particular role, is more important to psychological
outcomes (Barnett and Hyde, 2001; Thoits, 1992). Krause (1995; 2005) found, for example, that
negative dimensions of social ties were a particular source of unhappiness and distress. Ryan and
Willits (2007) further indicated that having a satisfying relationship with adult children, rather than
the frequency of parent-child interactions, was significantly associated with older people’s personal
feelings of well-being. These findings suggest that parent-perceived quality of relationship with
offspring should be associated with parental satisfaction in later life. We thus formulated:

Hypothesis 1: Relationship quality with offspring is positively associated with
parental satisfaction.

Furthermore, parental expectations of offspring’s various types of support may be related to pa-
rental satisfaction in late life in the context of China. Despite filial obligation to one’s parents being a
moral imperative found in almost all societies (Silverstein, Conroy, and Gans, 2012), the norms go-
verning parental support differ between Western and Chinese cultures, with the former preferring
independence and the latter valuing interdependence (Markus and Kitayama, 1991). Unlike in West-
ern cultures where filial duty is often viewed as the practice of caring for aging parents “at times of
need” (Gans and Silverstein, 2006), filial duty in the form of filial piety within Confucian culture
requires offspring providing sufficient emotional, physical, and financial support to older parents
(Johnson, 1983; Wang, Laidlaw, Power et al., 2010) regardless of parental needs (Kim, Cheng, Zarit
et al., 2015). It is likely that such differential cultural norms can affect role quality by way of affect-
ing role practices (Barnett and Hyde, 2001), given that social integration and support may be condi-
tioned upon cultural context (Thoits, 2011). Therefore, we theorized our second hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2a: Offspring’s emotional support is positively associated with
parental satisfaction.

Hypothesis 2b: Offspring’s practical/instrumental support is positively associated
with parental satisfaction.

Hypothesis 2c: Offspring’s financial support is positively associated with parental
satisfaction.

Moreover, filial piety, as a multifaceted concept, is a much broader belief system (Li, Pang, Chen
et al., 2010) beyond providing emotional, practical, and financial support. It also prescribes, for in-
stance, a set of behaviors and attitudes requires a child showing love and respect towards one’s par-
ents. In contemporary Chinese, (being) filial is used to indicate that a child has successfully behaved
in ways consistent with the parents’ cultural expectations of filial piety. Accordingly, learning to be a
filial child is “the essential first step toward being socialized to be an acceptable adult member of
society” (Ho, Xie, Liang et al., 2012). An adult child who fails to meet the parent’s expectations of
filial piety thus exhibits filial discrepancy (Cheng and Chan, 2006) and is considered unfilial or less
than filial. Consequently, offspring’s filial discrepancy may heighten parental feelings of social
stigma and make parents view their parental role as a failure — self-critical thoughts that are detri-

International Journal of Population Studies | 2016, Volume 2, Issue 1 55