Older adults who migrate to urban areas to live near adult children face complex expectations about care provision shaped by individual health status, family structure, and community integration. Understanding these determinants is essential for designing policies that support aging populations in migration contexts, where traditional support systems are disrupted and formal care infrastructure remains underdeveloped.
Key Points
- Migration to urban centers disrupts traditional family care networks for older adults
- Health status, family composition, and community belonging predict care expectations
- Policy design must account for migrant-specific vulnerabilities in aging populations
Longevity Analysis
This research maps a critical gap in how health systems serve aging populations displaced from established social infrastructure. When older adults relocate for proximity to working-age children, they lose the community networks that historically buffered against isolation, cognitive decline, and unmanaged chronic disease. The intersection of individual health trajectory, family availability, and community embeddedness determines whether aging in these conditions supports longevity or accelerates decline. Policies that ignore these interconnected factors will fail to prevent the cascade of unaddressed signals—fatigue, loneliness, untreated inflammation—that characterize accelerated aging in migration contexts.
Original published by SAGE Research on Aging, by Rui Kang, Jia-Jia Zhou1Department of Applied Social Sciences, 26680The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China2Research Centre for Gerontology and Family Studies, 26680The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China3Department of Social Work, 26679Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China4Department of Sociology, 26679Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China.