Older People and Factors for Leaving Families

Abstract

Indian culture treats the whole world as one human family “Vasudev Kutumbakam”. The beauty about the Indian culture lies in its age-long prevailing tradition of the joint family system. The Indian family has been a dominant institution in the life of the individual and the community based on strong values of love, care and mutual respect, bound the family members together. But in the last few decades, the researches show that the traditional joint family has crumbled due to forces of urbanization and modernization which lead to the establishment of nuclear families. In nuclear families led to erosion of authority commanded by the older members as the economic head of the family. Because of this reason older parents became economically depend on their children which threatens the status of financial, emotional and self esteem of older persons. These threats along with independent living and modern values of children create conflicts between older parents and other family members, say, Sons and daughter-in- laws. And other factors such as lack of care, ill treatment by family members, Income of the sons were not sufficient to run the family led older parents leave their families and joined old age homes. The objective of this paper is to analyse the factors responsible for older persons to leave the families, to know the level of life-satisfaction of older person in old age homes and to understand the demographic profile of the older persons.