Introduction
It is widely accepted that wellbeing in later life is highly relational, perhaps more than at other ages, and that relationships with offspring are especially significant. There is a tendency, particularly in developing countries, to portray these relationships in stylised terms. These include an assumption that, ceteris paribus, higher levels of contact with offspring (including co-residence) lead to higher levels of material security and general wellbeing in later life (United Nations Population Division 2005). There is also a tendency to assume asymmetric dependency in both the material and affective domains, whereby older people are almost always ‘net beneficiaries’ (United Nations Population Fund 2002). A third common assumption is that older women are more likely than older men to receive support from offspring as a consequence of their lifelong commitment to family responsibilities (Beales Reference Beales2000).
The evidence for these assumptions is not however robust, and the settings in which these relationships operate are highly diverse, complex and dynamic. This paper explores older people's perceptions of their relationships with their children and other offspring in a socially excluded neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. It considers the informants' understandings of the effects of these relationships on their current wellbeing in both material terms and more holistically. To this end, we draw on insights from the gender studies that have highlighted the importance of relational aspects of wellbeing (Jackson Reference Jackson1997), and explore the way that the informants made sense of their relations with specific children. This approach chimes with the increasingly holistic and subjective understandings of wellbeing that are being adopted in mainstream development studies (Gough et al. Reference Gough, McGregor and Camfield2006) and contrasts sharply with the many studies of older people in the developing world that have been exclusively concerned with income poverty (Lloyd-Sherlock Reference Lloyd-Sherlock2006a). It also enables us to move away from over-generalised understandings of the links between gender, ‘family capital’ and wellbeing in later life, to engage with more situated analyses of how meanings about family relationships are constructed.
As well as distinguishing between narrow material and open subjective approaches to wellbeing, the paper seeks to locate older people's current experiences in a life course framework. Rather than treating later life as a discrete life stage, it is framed as part of a process of lifelong transition. More specifically, we explore the extent to which the forms and meanings of relationships with offspring and subjective understandings of wellbeing are mediated by lifetime experiences. In doing so, we make use of the notion of ‘successful ageing’ (Rowe and Kahn Reference Rowe and Kahn1998), which takes into account quality of life and interpretations of past experience (a life ‘well-lived’). By combining life course perspectives with different approaches to wellbeing, the paper offers an account of inter-generational relationships as experienced by socially-excluded older people. This brings to light several findings that directly challenge established assumptions about later life in developing countries.
Relational wellbeing, family capital and the gendered life course
Most development studies research on older people's lives in developing countries focuses on a narrow range of material concerns and obvious policy issues, such as income security, access to pensions and, less emphatically, health status (Barrientos, Gorman and Heslop Reference Barrientos, Gorman and Heslop2003; Lloyd-Sherlock Reference Lloyd-Sherlock and Lloyd-Sherlock2004). It is widely believed that in countries with poorly-developed pension systems, family and particularly children are a vital form of social insurance for old age (United Nations Population Fund 2002). Where pension provision is more widespread, research has focussed on the extent to which benefits are pooled across households and whether they crowd out or bolster other forms of support (Lloyd-Sherlock Reference Lloyd-Sherlock2006b). Consequently, most research on older people's living arrangements and contacts with off-spring has been concerned primarily with flows of material and instrumental support (Palloni and Peláez Reference Palloni and Peláez2002; Gomes da Conceição and Montes de Oca Zavala Reference Gomes da Conceição, Montes de Oca Zavala and Lloyd-Sherlock2003; Aboderin Reference Aboderin and Lloyd-Sherlock2004). Notwithstanding the ambivalent findings, the idea has persisted that links with children, in particular co-residence, are closely linked to material wellbeing in later life. A recent survey of Latin America and the Caribbean reported that, ‘co-residence significantly increases the probability of receiving support … the number of living children positively affects the chances of older persons receiving financial assistance’ (United Nations Population Division 2005: 104).
It is widely recognised by gerontological studies in developed and developing country settings that material exchange between the generations often flows in both directions, that not all children contribute to the wellbeing of their older parents, and that many older people give more than they receive (Schröder-Butterfill Reference Schröder-Butterfill2004; Lloyd-Sherlock Reference Lloyd-Sherlock1997; Henretta, Grundy and Harris Reference Henretta, Grundy and Harris2002; Hoff Reference Hoff2007). Despite this, there is an implicit assumption that in low-income settings children are a form of potential material wellbeing in later life, which may be lost through childlessness, AIDS-related mortality, migration or other factors. The possibility that children may also be a source of material vulnerability and ill-being in later life does not seem to have been considered. The conceptual frameworks that inform much research on the circumstances of older people in developing countries can be critiqued for their simplistic generalisations about family relations across extremely diverse and dynamic settings, for their reductionist representation of children as an investment or asset on which older people can rely, and their focus on individualised and material understandings of wellbeing in old age. Although they draw support from evidence of the alleged strength of social norms about children's obligations to elderly parents in diverse contexts, it is rarely acknowledged that such norms are culturally specific and change in response to wider economic, social and political developments. Moreover, it should not be assumed that social norms translate into social practice. Notions of relational wellbeing engage closely with how access to material wellbeing is mediated by specific social relations. These relations unfold over time and are contingent on several factors. A relational approach to wellbeing is also valuable because it reveals how subjective wellbeing is bound up with gendered concerns about children and other close relatives and friends. In other words, these social relations matter not just as conduits of material support, but also because they have intrinsic emotional value and are a significant source of wellbeing in their own right.
Whilst life course approaches to older people's wellbeing have recognised many of these dynamics, a stylised view has emerged, which contrasts older women's tendency to benefit from their earlier reproductive endeavours with older men's isolation and diluted ‘family capital’ – a result of their conflictive or disinterested relations with children earlier in life (Gomes da Conceição and Montes de Oca Zavala 2003). These polarised representations conflate social stereotypes and norms with wider social practice and neglect the negotiability of family relations as the various members age. Social constructions of parent-child relations feed into this process, but the subjective agency of parents and children means that they are not trapped by these normative frameworks. Indeed, other insights from life course perspectives on ageing have usefully drawn attention to the way old age involves renegotiating parent-child relations, as well as a desire to make sense of one's life that can lead to closer relations with children in later years (Schröder-Butterfill Reference Schröder-Butterfill2004; Varley and Blasco Reference Varley and Blasco2003).
Research design and the urban setting
The evidence for this study was collected in 2006 through 22 in-depth life history interviews with older people living in Bajo Flores, a neighbourhood of the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and supplemented by key informant interviews with local community figures.Footnote 1 We took an exploratory approach that enabled the informants to define their current wellbeing in their own terms and to focus on those life experiences that they deemed particularly significant. Nevertheless, the study was guided by the premise that wellbeing in later life is highly relational, and that both the form and meanings of these relations are strongly mediated by experiences through the life course.
The selection of the research setting reflected several considerations. There have been complex socio-economic changes in Argentina during the lives of its older residents. In their childhood and youth, the country's level of prosperity was comparable to many ‘developed’ countries, and booming industrial centres such as Buenos Aires led to large flows of migrants from the relatively poor northern provinces (Lewis Reference Lewis2002). This period also saw the establishment of a relatively embracing welfare state, including near-universal education and health-care, as well as pensions for formal-sector workers. From the mid-1970s, the country experienced economic instability and decline, the virtual collapse of its urban industries and rising poverty and unemployment. Thus, opportunities have shifted through the lives of informants, and between them and younger generations.
These processes of change have had complex effects on families and inter-generational relationships. By the 1990s, the great majority of households in Argentina were nuclear rather than extended, and 37 per cent had at least one person aged 60 or more years (Sunkel Reference Sunkel2006). It is widely claimed that social change and economic instability have put families under growing strain, to the particular detriment of women's wellbeing. Over recent decades, divorce, female headship and children born outside of marriage have all risen, along with the tendency for adult children to remain living with their older parents (Jelín Reference Jelín and Arraigada2005; Sunkel Reference Sunkel2006). Clear indications of shifting norms and attitudes are however less evident. On the one hand, studies from various parts of Latin America point to the resilience of the inter-generational obligations that are embedded in Roman Catholic teaching (Varley and Blasco Reference Varley and Blasco2003; Melhuus Reference Melhuus, Melhuus and Stolen1996). On the other hand, some studies suggest that there has been a weakening of traditional models of authority based on age, as a more youth-centred and individualistic set of values have taken hold (Jelín Reference Jelín and Arraigada2005). Interestingly, anthropological research conducted in impoverished rural and urban districts of Mexico back in the 1950s and 60s referred to similar normative shifts (Lewis Reference Lewis1951; Lewis Reference Lewis1969).
The research was conducted in a single neighbourhood of Buenos Aires: Bajo Flores. Although not intended to represent wider conditions in Argentina or even Buenos Aires, the district's history has been closely linked to the wider national experience. The neighbourhood was first established as a shanty town during the 1940s by northern migrants who moved to the city for employment. Since the 1970s, it has faced deepening social problems and Bajo Flores is today notorious across Buenos Aires for high levels of crime, drug dealing and street violence.Footnote 2 Partly in response to these problems, the neighbourhood has attracted various social investments. Most of the original shanties have been replaced by state-financed housing, and the infrastructure has been upgraded, including schools and health centres. Over the past five years, the residents of Bajo Flores have been targeted by an array of personal-assistance programmes, which offer both food and cash (Villatoro Reference Villatoro2005). These have reduced income poverty in the neighbourhood, but have had little if any effect on long-term unemployment and drug abuse. The problems faced by Bajo Flores are not exceptional in Latin America. In many of its regions, similar anti-poverty programmes have made considerable progress in reducing urban poverty, while unemployment and drug-related violence have increased (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean 2006; Moser et al. Reference Moser, Winton and Moser2003). A growing number of older people live in such neighbourhoods, yet they remain largely ignored by academic and policy researchers, partly because of the intrinsic difficulties of working in dangerous environments.
The interpretation of the narratives
The analysis reported in this paper focused on the impact of parent-child relationships on wellbeing in later life as experienced by the informants. The absence of complementary perspectives, such as from the interviewees' children, spouses, close relatives and friends, means that the narratives are but a partial picture of the informants' wellbeing. Furthermore, life histories involve informants ‘storifying’ their lives, so that they make sense for researchers (Riessman Reference Riessman and Riessman1994: 114). Such accounts can to varying degrees exhibit self-justification or self-blame, as well as a tendency to order random events. Our interpretation of the data was not concerned with constructing reliable factual accounts, but sought to generate a rich sense of the subjective wellbeing of older people, with particular reference to their understanding of their relationships with children. As such, the narratives reveal how older people use their understanding of family relationships to make sense of their unfolding relations with children and their current wellbeing.
Gender ideologies influence the production of individual life-history narratives in complex ways. They permeate the way in which individuals perceive, articulate and make sense of their lives, and directly influence their material conditions. For instance, some of the male informants tended to be less prepared to discuss their life experiences, other than those associated with work, in more than a superficial way. Normative ideas about masculinities and femininities shape what can be thought and what is said and how, and also inform the ways in which individuals evaluate their lifetime experiences. The contradictions between, on the one hand, finding a way of talking about or making sense of injustices or disappointments experienced in life and, on the other, the constraints or expectations of gendered normative frameworks, mean that the silences and ambiguities in the accounts are significant data.
The complexity of the narratives meant that it was necessary to strike a balance between capturing the richness of the individual narratives and teasing out a more general, systematic picture from the entire data set. The informants' life trajectories were diverse and usually complex: some had had many children and grandchildren, which created difficulties with the analysis of multiple relationships over time. Most of the informants' lives involved considerable instability – complex migratory trajectories, moves within the city, changes in household structure, marital instability and uncertain livelihoods. For many informants, it was difficult to identify one or more key turning points among the frequent radical changes in their lives. Rather than trying to resolve these complexities or to obtain complete information about the changing structures of kinship networks over time, we focused instead on commonalities and differences in how the informants referred to particular relationships, turning points or changes in circumstance that they said were significant influences on the course of their lives. These complexities add to the richness of the case studies, reveal the limitations of simple life cycle or life-stage frameworks for understanding individual's experiences, and call into question orthodox conceptualisations of inter-generational relationships and well-being in later life.
Wellbeing and relations with children and grandchildren
Previous studies of older people's wellbeing and their family relations in Latin America have made two main points. Firstly, it has been observed that older people, particularly women, are increasingly likely to live alone, and that this is associated with disadvantage and vulnerability (United Nations Population Division 2005). This trend has been driven by several factors, including a sharp fall in the birth rate (that has reduced the number of surviving children), geographical mobility and changing attitudes to co-residence. On the other hand, it is also widely claimed that older people with pensions tend to share these benefits with younger relatives, and that this has boosted inter-generational exchange and co-residence (Bertranou and Grushka Reference Bertranou and Grushka2002).
Table 1 presents the numbers of children, grandchildren and great- grandchildren reported by the informants. The plentiful supply of descendants might suggest that the informants could expect substantial support through their family networks, perhaps especially the women.Footnote 3 Of the 22 informants, 17 had at least three surviving children. Only one informant had no (great)grandchildren, and for many the number of grandchildren was strikingly high. Since most informants had become grandparents by their early forties, at the time of the research many of the grandchildren were adults. Grandparenting was not therefore necessarily associated with old age, and there was considerable potential for grandparent-grandchildren links to be significant for later life wellbeing. While seven informants reported that they lived alone, most had several offspring living in Bajo Flores.
Table 1. The informants' household sizes and reported offspring
Notes: 1. These are pseudonyms. 2. As reported by the informants.
Despite the apparently numerous offspring, only one informant saw herself as heavily reliant on younger relatives for economic support. In the great majority of cases, the informants claimed no reliance or indicated that one of more of their children were economically dependent on them. The extent to which they relied on younger relatives for instrumental help was less clear, with most keenly affirming their independence. There was strong evidence, however, that the women were more likely to see themselves as on balance net care-givers rather than care-receivers – they said that they provided support for spouses, grandchildren and, in several cases, seriously disabled children. Taking a material approach to wellbeing, it appears that family networks and inter-generational exchange were relatively unimportant.Footnote 4 This is surprising since less than one-half of the informants received pensions and many were impoverished.Footnote 5 In some cases, older people with children in the neighbourhood were forced to rely on charity and begging. Several expressed deep bitterness at the lack of support they received. According to one older woman, ‘I worked while I had the strength to. I gave them [children] everything. Now I've lost my strength and can't do anything, they've just vanished into thin air’. Her words point to the felt injustice of her situation; she affirmed that she has been a good mother and did not deserve to be abandoned in old age.
The in-depth life histories provide an opportunity to supplement a material approach to wellbeing with richer understandings and interpretations. The next section presents two case studies that illustrate the multi-faceted nature of these relationships. Each informant's account contains significant unique features, and so it is not possible to choose a single case that exemplifies wider experiences. Nevertheless, Eulogia and Roberto's testimonies give a sense of the range of gendered experiences and the different issues that need to be considered. The section concludes by making some more general observations about inter-generational relationships and the way that informants constructed ideas about specific children in making sense of their lives.
Eulogia's relationships with her daughters
At the time of the interview, Eulogia was aged 73 years. She had six daughters, 24 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. She maintained contact with all of them, and every year they came together to celebrate her birthday. Eulogia talked about her various daughters in very different ways. She was rather disparaging about four of them, comparing her own life of hard work and ‘struggle’ – working as a seamstress for 25 years ‘without getting up from the machine’ – to the daughters' easy lives. She was emphatic that none of the four did anything for her, but instead ‘had the cheek’ to come to her for money. According to Eulogia, the daughters had become over-reliant on welfare handouts and were incompetent at managing their husbands' money. She was especially bitter that none of them made any effort to help with her husband's funeral costs. She went on to complain (somewhat contradictorily) that one daughter was too wrapped up in her own work to raise her children properly, and that this has led one grandson to get involved in drugs and crime.
Eulogia talked about her other two daughters very differently. One of these had her own family, while the youngest, María, was unmarried and still lived with her. María had been studying at university when Eulogia's husband fell terminally ill, six years before. According to Eulogia, María dropped out of university to care for him, and they both became severely depressed when he died. This prevented María from returning to her studies. At the time of the research, she helped Eulogia make and sell meat-pasties at a local market, which was their main livelihood. Eulogia was very compassionate about María, and portrayed her as sensitive, unworldly and good-hearted. Eulogia expressed concern that when she would become too old to look out for her, María would be unable to cope with life. Eulogia claimed that María had no desire to marry, having seen her sisters' generally unhappy marriages. Following her husband's death, Eulogia and María both converted to evangelical Christianity, and this eventually helped them both to overcome their grief.
Eulogia described Ana, the fifth daughter, as more independent than María, but evaluated her more positively than the other four. Ana occasionally helped with making the pasties and shared their evangelical faith. When Eulogia once travelled away from Buenos Aires for three months, she arranged for Ana to look after María. Eulogia claimed that the main purpose of the trip was to help María get used to coping on her own.
Eulogia's moral evaluations of her children were central to her life story. Her construction of four of her daughters as problematic clearly associated their neglect of filial obligations with their irresponsibility as mothers and wives. There was not, however, a straightforward relationship between the level of the support that she received from a daughter and Eulogia's judgement of her. For Eulogia, the key issues were whether the daughter shared her religious faith, whether she felt their ethic of struggle and hard work compared favourably to her own, and the extent to which they could rely on each other at difficult times. Her husband's death had been a gauge of these qualities, and had either affirmed or remoulded her attitude to each daughter. Whilst the tradition in Argentina is for the youngest daughter to stay at home to care for the parents in old age, Eulogia, who appeared energetic, entrepreneurial and independent, emphasised her youngest daughter's vulnerability and dependence on her.
Roberto's renewed relationship with his adult daughter
Roberto was aged 64 years at the time of interview and provided a very different narrative. He had only one daughter, from a short-lived marriage more than 40 years ago that collapsed when his daughter was only a few months old. He then migrated to Buenos Aires and lost all contact with her. Roberto claimed that he never remarried because he never came to terms with the loss of his first family. About one year before our research, he visited his place of birth and tracked down his daughter's telephone number. She was 40 years old, married with six children and living in a middle-class neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. Since then he had visited her every week, and described their re-acquaintance as a near-miraculous, life-changing event:
My life changed when I found my daughter. I'm a totally different person now. Before I didn't have dealings with anyone, didn't talk to anyone, just stayed inside my room, not talking to anyone. But when I found her it all changed, as if all the guilt had been lifted away because I hadn't gone looking for her when her mother had taken her off.
Roberto's life may have been ‘transformed’, but he said that he received little material support from his daughter, even though he was in a very bad economic position. Following a serious accident two years before, he had been unable to work but had yet to receive a pension. He lived in a tumbledown shack and had survived on a small payment that he received after the accident and by visiting soup kitchens. He said that his daughter did not visit him in Bajo Flores, because he did not want her to see how he lived. Later in the interview, Roberto admitted that he sometimes felt depressed, useless and alone, despite having found his daughter. Given his daughter's relative success, his ‘shameful’ circumstances and the guilt of abandoning the parental role, Roberto regarded her limited and one-sided engagement with him as excusable and, to some extent, what he wished.
Interpreting relationships between parents and adult children
These two contrasting accounts demonstrate the difficulty of systematically analysing the relationships between the informants and their children. Whilst Euologia and Roberto superficially conformed to opposed gender stereotypes (that older women keep in contact with many children, while older men have tenuous links to few children), their individual situations were much more complex. Both situations make apparent that although material exchange was limited, each informant's wider sense of wellbeing was strongly influenced by the ways they perceived their children and their relations with them. Key influences were how the informant judged the child's moral worth and how they evaluated their past and present roles as parents. Drawing on all the interviews, it is possible to identify some broad themes in the ways in which the children were perceived.
Several informants referred with pride to the children they perceived to have been successful. Of these, some had obtained university degrees and all were either in high-status jobs or had married someone with such a job. In almost every case, these children had moved away from Bajo Flores to better districts of the city. As with Roberto's daughter, most of these children provided little direct support and rarely came to see them. It was understood that the neighbourhood was too dangerous to visit, that the children led busy lives and had to put their own children's needs first. The informants compared their own inferior origins, limited education and, as they saw them, humble achievements to their children's, and some interviewees reasoned that they had little to offer them. It is possible that the informants were inclined to portray most children who had moved away as ‘successful’, since it was difficult for those living in the neighbourhood to gainsay this, and to justify the little contact they had with them.
Another category of children can be loosely referred to as ‘strugglers’. The informants emphasised the difficult lives led by these children, mainly through economic stress, problems finding stable jobs, and marital crises. They had various levels of sympathy with these children, as Eulogia's account testified, but overall they appeared to be more a source of concern and bitterness than of support or contentment.
A third category, sometimes overlapping with struggling children, was perceived as highly problematic and viewed with a sense of unhappiness. This often entailed a construction of the child as a burden. These views were expressed about children that the informants felt had ‘gone off the rails’ or ‘strayed from the right path in life’, most commonly through drug addiction, violence and imprisonment.Footnote 6 Several children had directly harmed the informant by assault, stealing from them and, in one case, attempting to appropriate their house. Other children had significant disabilities or mental or physical health problems, which left them highly dependent on the informants.
The number of struggling or ‘problem’ children was much greater than the number regarded as successful. In many cases, this had substantial impacts on the informants' lives. One informant lived with a seriously disabled daughter and a violent, mentally unstable grandson, and another child had died in prison in violent circumstances. One informant had been robbed by her drug-addict daughter two days before the interview; she was raising several of this daughter's children herself. Another informant lived with a mentally disabled son with learning difficulties, and had lost a second son as a result of political violence. Concerns about the welfare of children emerged as a major theme in almost all the interviews. Many of the concerns stemmed from major past or present crises, and had a strong negative influence on the informants' sense of wellbeing. Almost every informant had at least one child who had gone through a serious life crisis that had impacted on the informant's wellbeing. Past crises, particularly those involving the death of a child, were an enduring cause of sadness and depression.
The concern that a child or grandchild might ‘go off the rails’, or that a problem child would behave ‘destructively’ (harming either themselves or the informant) was a prevalent source of unhappiness and vulnerability among the older people in the neighbourhood. While it has something in common with the abuse of older people, this aspect of later life vulnerability has not been identified in other studies (Schröder-Butterfill and Marianti Reference Schröder-Butterfill and Marianti2006), which may be because of the paucity of research in violent, socially-excluded settings. It may also reflect the taken-for-granted assumption that children are a potential resource in later life, rather than adopting a more realistic view of parent-child relationships. It is plausible that this pattern of relationships is particular to neighbourhoods like Bajo Flores. Living in such a neighbourhood may contribute to problematic relationships, and receiving scant support from children reduces an older person's opportunities to live elsewhere. Nevertheless, it would be dangerous to assume that older people living in other socially excluded neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires or indeed any Latin American city are immune to these forms of vulnerability.
Life course events and wellbeing
So far, the paper has demonstrated the value of going beyond material approaches to wellbeing and inter-generational exchange. It has also shown the difficulty of identifying direct, generalisable links between the level of current contacts with offspring and wellbeing in later life. It is already evident from Euologia and Roberto's stories that key events in the past had influenced the meaning and value of current relations with children: Eulogia saw the events surrounding her husband's death as particularly telling of her various daughters' filial commitment; and Roberto's actions to re-establish relations with his daughter were ‘transformational’. Now we use a life course framework to examine how particular turning points are constructed by older people as crucial for their relations with their children and perceived wellbeing over time, and to elucidate the interplay of wider events and personal biographies.
As applied to sociology, life course approaches have made several important contributions for the analysis of diverse personal narratives (Elder Jr Reference Elder1998; Heinz and Krüger Reference Heinz and Krüger2001). Several guiding precepts have been established: (i) that individuals construct their own life courses through the choices and actions they take within the opportunities and constraints of history and social circumstances; (ii) that lives are lived inter-dependently (linked lives), with historical and social influences expressed through networks of shared relationships; (iii) that the developmental impact of a succession of life transitions or events depends on when they occur in a person's life (timing); and (iv) that individual life courses are embedded in the historical times and places they experience over their lifetimes. The concept of ‘successful ageing’ (Rowe and Kahn Reference Rowe and Kahn1998), or of ‘a life well-lived’, engages particularly well with our concerns about how respondents' interpretations of past experiences and relationships with particular children influence perceptions of current wellbeing and relations with children. As in the previous section, we shall illustrate the application of a life-course framework through two different case studies before making more general observations.
Daniela's accommodation of her poverty
Daniela (aged 68 years) and her husband (72 years) lived without others in a small, poorly maintained, two-room house built by the government on the edge of the shanty town. They shared her husband's pension (470 pesos, equivalent to £55 a month), and their per capita income was below the official poverty line (£45). Daniela had started the process of claiming a pension of her own, although whether it would be granted was unclear. She had had four children, and three were still alive. They received no material support from their surviving children, and had no other form of income or livelihood. While Daniela's material standard of living was not good, she assessed the relational elements of her wellbeing quite positively. She felt that she and her husband got along with each other well, and were happy living without their children. Daniela emphasised her active life-style, large number of friends and wide social network, which centred on her religious beliefs – Daniela had converted to evangelical Christianity and was an active church member. She took particular pleasure from her 21 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren, with whom she had a lot of contact.
According to Daniela, her early childhood experiences, particularly her mother's behaviour, had been key influences on her material circumstances throughout her life. Soon after her birth in Buenos Aires, her father died and her mother placed her in the care of relatively affluent godparents whilst she went to work. Daniela was very happy with this arrangement, but her godmother died when she was aged 12 years, and her mother insisted that she return to live with her. Daniela said:
I wanted to stay put, because there were children of my own age in the same house. Their mother had been like a second mum to me and asked me to stay … but my mother said, ‘Pah!’ She gave me a good slap and took me away crying, so fast that we didn't stay for my godmother's funeral. I never found out where they buried her.
Daniela's mother's marriage swiftly collapsed, their economic situation deteriorated and by the time Daniela was 16 years-of-age, they were living in a shanty town. A few months after arriving there, Daniela married a local man and soon had her first child. Daniela feels that she and her husband have ever since been trapped in chronic poverty. She contrasts her life with the way it might have been without her mother's problems or had her godmother lived.
Given Daniela's narrative, her assessment that she ‘has a good life’ is striking. This positive outlook is firmly rooted in her evangelical beliefs, which were a source of resilience in the face of difficult circumstances. She explained, ‘It's very beautiful. I feel so well now, I feel accompanied, never alone. It gives me vitality that I need to keep going in life. I tell everyone I can that they have to go [to the evangelical church] now because there are so many bad things happening in the world.’ Daniela's conversion to evangelical Christianity took place in 1986 when she was aged 49 years. Shortly before her youngest son, Rubén, was ‘abandoned’ by his wife, who took their two young children. Daniela had been devastated by the news, was furious with her daughter-in-law, and became depressed. She recollected:
I felt really bad. It even started to give me heart problems and high blood pressure. … Then I went to the [evangelical] church … and they all started praying. I saw this great light. It was like I was coming to life again … something bad escaped from deep inside me – I'd really wanted to murder that woman.
Daniela said that this experience gave her the inner strength to cope with the crisis. After a few years, her son remarried. By that time, Daniela felt she had overcome his loss and that her prayer had played an important part in his recovery. It is particularly telling that when later another child, Luís, died following a long history of illness and alcohol abuse, Daniela felt more able to cope this crisis than with the earlier divorce. As well as her conversion, her contrasting moral evaluations of Luís as a ‘problem child’ and Carlos as a ‘deserving struggler’ may explain her different responses.
Carlos's generative investment in a grandson
When interviewed, Carlos was aged 79 years. He had been seriously injured in an accident at work several years before and received the basic pension. The household lived off this pension, along with his son-in-law's earnings as a bus driver and food parcels from an assistance programme. Carlos did not get on very well with his 67-years-old wife and other family members, was concerned and frustrated by his health problems, had few friends in Bajo Flores, and was unable to get about as much as he used to. Nevertheless he said:
When I go to bed, I look at my house and I give thanks to God. I still find it hard to believe that I am living like this, in this place. … Apart from that, I feel happy because I have such great daughters. They came out so lovely, thanks to God. And the lad was more than that, [sighs] that's something that … [tails off]. It almost did me in; he was so lovely.
Like Daniela and many other informants, Carlos had an unstable and difficult early life. He was born in one of the poorest provinces of Argentina, Tucumán, where the economy was dominated by sugar-cane monoculture. He had worked in the cane fields from the age of 14 years, but when many of the sugar mills closed in the mid-1960s, he decided to migrate the 700 miles to Buenos Aires. Carlos struggled to find stable work and had to move house several times, but he was acutely aware of the even more impoverished conditions in Tucumán. He explained:
I'm glad I came here because of all the poverty in Tucumán. It breaks your heart to see how the people live there. The people back in my village have to work on a daily rate cutting down scrub … and they don't get hardly anything for it. All over the province, people have to work like that just for food.
Carlos's subjective wellbeing was not influenced by a single transformational event like Daniela's conversion, but was profoundly shaped by his only son's death and the subsequent events. Carlos recalled: ‘I cried a lot about my son, for a whole week. And after three months I'd gone down from 68 kilos to 60, then 57. I walked the streets talking to myself. I would see some young men and think they were my son. You can lose a mother, father or brother, but your own son – that's tough.’ Carlos was finally able to bring himself out of depression when he discovered that his son had left a child that he had not previously known about. His vivid account of the events continued:
… but his girlfriend didn't want the child to come to our house or to know us. Then one day my daughter's boyfriend came. … I didn't want to go out [as he suggested], I didn't want to listen to the football, to do anything. … He said, ‘Carlos, a woman and a child are looking for you’. The girl's grandmother had escaped; that is, she'd stolen the child away and brought it here so we could know about it. The kid didn't know anything about us. I went down to the door … there was this lady with a kid. [The child] said, ‘hello, granddad’. I didn't do anything. I was so surprised; I was stuck in the doorframe, like I was glued to it. … I picked him up in my arms, just to have him for a moment. It really was my own son in my arms.
Carlos's grandson was eight years-of-age at the time. Since then, Carlos has maintained contact with him, but the boy has not matched Carlos's expectations. Carlos said, ‘I wanted to take him under my wing to make sure he studied. I told him, “If you end up with your father's memory, you'll be a marvel”. But he didn't want to study … he quit after eight years. It's a couple of weeks since I've seen him’. Carlos continues to feel the death of his only son keenly, and this has tempered any sense of an improved life since leaving Tucumán. He enjoys contact with his remaining daughters, and is proud of the ‘way they have turned out’ and of his grandchildren. As with his son's boy, his understanding of his relationship with the grandchildren is sometimes parental. Carlos recollected that ‘we had my granddaughter with us for a while when she was very little. It was almost like she was my … [tails off]. I had her for almost a year. She was brought up by me.
Coping with life's reverses
In similarly constrained circumstances, Daniela and Carlos constructions of their lives were very different. Their subjective perceptions of their wellbeing were strongly influenced by non-material considerations: their intimate relations, friendships and spirituality. Whilst religious belief was a source of comfort for Carlos, for Daniela it also provided an active social life that supplemented her family contacts and had transformed the way she experienced past crises. Both singled out particular experiences in the past that they felt had determined the course of their lives: for Daniela, these were the circumstances surrounding her childhood and conversion; for Carlos, they were his migration to Buenos Aires and his son's death.
Despite their very different lives, Daniela's and Carlos's subjective wellbeing cannot be understood solely by reference to their current circumstances, but have to be interpreted through their wider life experiences or biographies. Their agency was demonstrated by Daniela's conversion, partly in response to Ruben's divorce, and by Carlos's attempt to parent his son's boy and his granddaughter. The interdependence of their lives with those of their children was complex and a source of both vulnerability and satisfaction, each of which varied in intensity and importance over time. Daniela and Carlos's experiences question the common assumption that older women's lives are more ‘linked’ to those of their children than older men's lives. In fact, religion had transformed Daniela's relations with her children and their lives, and had given her substantial resilience in the face of a child's death. It had enabled her to supplement, and to some extent substitute, social relationships with children for those formed through the church. Carlos's primary pain (his intense grief over the death of his son) and principal pleasure (how his daughters ‘turned out’) were both rooted in his relationships with his children, and he used the idiom of parenting to express his love for his grandchildren.
The timing of specific life events is critical to their impact, as evinced by the different effects that the loss of a son had on Daniela and Carlos. Luis's death was not as severe a blow to Daniela as was Ruben's divorce, partly because it occurred after her conversion. Carlos's son's death had been a bitter blow, partly because he was the only male descendant and occurred when the mother's child bearing was complete. The embeddedness of individual lives in specific times and places is manifest in the fact that Daniela's and Carlos's choices and experiences were shaped by broader historical events. Evangelism was making inroads into neighbourhoods like Bajo Flores and actively seeking converts at the time when Ruben was divorced (Semán Reference Semán and Svampa2000). The collapse of Tucumán's sugar industry and the availability of jobs in Buenos Aires for migrants influenced Carlos's decision to move to the city. Given the unique articulations of these experiences, it is not possible to capture them systematically for the entire set of interviews. In other narratives, the distinction between material and non-material aspects of wellbeing was not always as evident. Nonetheless many of the accounts resonate with Daniela's and Carlos's stories. Collectively they demonstrate the value of examining different facets of wellbeing from a life course perspective.
The link that Daniela made between her childhood experiences and her later life wellbeing was evident in many other testimonies. Most of the informants referred to difficult childhoods, including unstable relationships, frequent violent acts and serious abuse. Many claimed to have been denied access to education and forced to work. For several informants, this had a great impact on their wellbeing in later life. Several connections were described. For some, these difficult childhoods had marked the start of a sequence of vulnerabilities, such as a lifetime of low-paid jobs or an early marriage (as a means of escape from an unhappy home life). Many informants still felt angry, traumatised and depressed about what had happened to them. In more than one case, this included serious diagnosed mental health problems. More generally, these experiences did much to shape the informants' attitudes towards their own children, and underpinned their efforts to ensure that their children had a better start in life. This ambition in turn influenced the wider relationships with their children.
A second set of common experiences was associated with migration to Buenos Aires. Echoing Roberto's testimony, several informants claimed that their move was prompted by a family crisis, often a failed marriage. Among the informants were several women who took the decision to leave young children behind with other relatives for several years. While justifying their decision, they claimed that this had often led to bitterness on the part of the children, which had affected their subsequent relationships. One informant carefully referred to the social norm that sanctions unreasonable treatment of wives by husbands to justify her abandonment of her children, who then saw her as a poor mother, and to construct the claim that she has been unfairly treated by her children. In her own words:
They didn't understand why I'd gone. It wasn't because I didn't love them. It was because my husband treated me so badly. If I'd have stayed there, I'd have been dead. My patience just snapped. … I left them with their father, so that he could learn what it really meant to have children, and so he could see how much they missed their mother. … Ever since then, the children have been so bitter; they never understood.
Several other informants, like Daniela and Eulogia, had converted to evangelical Christianity. Various evangelical churches had spread rapidly among poorer groups across Latin America (Martin Reference Martin1990). Their particular success in Bajo Flores partly reflected the degree of social exclusion and the insecurity experienced by many of its residents and the relative lack of engagement with local Catholic organisations. Excepting religious groups, community networks were poorly developed in the district, and many older people could not rely on their offspring for material or affective support. Often, accounts of the informants' conversions cited crises related to children or husbands. Flora's case is fairly typical. She was converted by her son, who himself had been converted after a life of ‘vice, drugs and drink’. Immediately following his conversion, Flora saw her son become hard working and responsible, for which she thanked God. When she fell seriously ill and was hospitalised, her son and other converts came to pray for her. She suggested that their concern contributed to her recovery. This narrative again demonstrates the inter-play of specific life course events and inter-generational relationships. In many cases, as with Daniela, the conversion framed the informants' general sense of wellbeing, and enabled them to come to terms with material hardships and disappointments about children. According to another informant, Sandra, ‘I know that I have to do without a lot of things; that I haven't been able to do a lot of things I'd dreamed about doing – like improving myself, staying in work, buying stuff for the kids, a computer. But I still have this strong faith, so I keep on hoping and trusting.’
While all the narratives contain significant examples of the interplay between discrete life course events, wellbeing and relationships with offspring, a key theme for all the informants was persistent instability and insecurity. Since early childhood, this had affected most aspects of their lives: relationships, employment, living conditions and engagement with the authorities. For example, many informants had been forced to move home frequently within Buenos Aires, particularly in 1976 when a large part of Bajo Flores was demolished by the military government. Most informants’ uncertain and insecure lives and relationships were projections of past experiences. This may also explain the attractiveness of the ‘certainties’ of evangelical beliefs and of the support of church communities and networks.
Conclusions
In the harsh couplet, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do’, Philip Larkin encapsulated the accepted wisdom that children are deeply vulnerable to their parents' actions and attitudes.Footnote 7 This paper has shown that a parent's welfare and self-esteem is equally vulnerable to their children's behaviour and attitudes. How parents deal with the resultant problems and crises can have a large effect on their wellbeing and their evaluation of their own lives – a key aspect of ‘successful ageing’. By drawing attention to these broader aspects of wellbeing, the paper offers a different perspective on older people's lives to that usually adopted in development studies, which tend to focus on a narrow range of material concerns such as income, access to pensions and, less emphatically, health. Without denying the importance of such issues, this study has given older people the voice to evaluate their own wellbeing and to identify the aspects that they feel to be most significant. It has shown that life histories, though not without problems, are an effective tool for obtaining these insights. By focussing on subjective perceptions of inter-generational relations, the study has drawn attention to the importance of questioning received meanings about family roles and their significance.
The paper has demonstrated that a comprehensive appreciation of older people's current wellbeing must make reference to their life course and wider experiences. Histories of relationships with children and other close family members are usually a central element of these experiences, but these relationships are unpredictable, and can be as much a source of crisis and vulnerability as of support and fulfilment. Contrary to the expectation that ‘successful children’ are the key to material security in old age, for many of our informants, having such children was deeply ambiguous. They provided little material support and relations with them were often distant, even though the informants had pride in their achievements. Relationships with children are also profoundly influenced by external factors, such as a setting of local social exclusion or national economic decline. By embedding individual biography within local geographies and wider histories, the life course approach offers helpful insights for understanding how older people's lives are constructed from social relations that unfold over long periods of time, and reveals how they are punctuated by unpredictable events or key turning points that may or may not be of their own making, and how they are part of the broader tide of historical events. The findings have demonstrated the importance of early life events for wellbeing in old age. This suggests that the difficult circumstances faced by young people in neighbourhoods like Bajo Flores will have lasting affects on their lives and will eventually shape their own wellbeing as older people.
The gendered life courses of those interviewed suggest that the conventional connections made between gender, ‘family capital’ and older people's wellbeing are simplistic. Whilst the informants' narratives made discursive use of social norms about gendered parent-child relations, these norms do not capture the complexity of actual relationships and the possibilities for renegotiating the meaning of these relationships over time. Older men were somewhat more likely to have lost contact with children earlier in their lives. In most cases this was perceived as involuntary, either as a result of separation or migration, rather than as a result of selfish or irresponsible behaviour, and the informants expressed deep regrets. Several female informants also felt, however, that they had suffered from loss of contact with a child as a result of disintegrating relationships and migrations to Buenos Aires, and some expressed strong regrets about this. Furthermore, loss of contact or distant relations with children early in life did not preclude re-establishing or improving relations with children and grandchildren in later life, nor sadly the converse – relations with children could also become more distant or problematic in later life for both men and women.
The older informants' relationships with their children at the time of the research did not all fit the stylised notion that children are especially important to older women. For instance, Daniela's testimony indicates that, while her children remained important to her, she was less emotionally dependent on them than Carlos was on his. Rather than discount the importance of gendered identities in later life, these stories demonstrate their complex effects. For example, Carlos's struggle to cope also reflected his frustration at no longer being able to work, a concern which was sometimes voiced by the female informants but was not as strongly tied to their self esteem. Gender matters, but not in the simplified and predictable way that is commonly assumed.
The informants' accounts draw attention to the dangers of idealising family relations as a support for older people in socially excluded settings. While the wellbeing of older people is strongly influenced by these relations, they tend to be unpredictable, and norms of inter-generational obligations are complex. This calls into question the stylised views of household dynamics which increasingly underpin social policies in developing countries (Sunkel Reference Sunkel2006). Instead of relying on assumptions of household altruism, social policy interventions must be grounded in empirical research in specific settings, which may give a rather different picture. Many aspects of the narratives resonate closely with the concepts of marginality and culture of poverty, influential in the 1950s and 60s, but subsequently attacked and eschewed for providing an overly-negative, passive and judgemental view of the poor (Lewis Reference Lewis1969; Perlman Reference Perlman1976). Rather than viewing marginality as a culture produced by the poor, characterised by fatalism and irresponsibility, our account stresses the agency of older people coping with problematic social relations associated with socially excluded settings.Footnote 8 The paper has also demonstrated how neighbourhood and community relations are equally significant for older people, and that interventions at this level must go beyond material provision to address more complex social issues. Dealing with local problems of drug abuse and unemployment might do much to reduce older people's vulnerability to more children ‘going off the rails’, the general fears they expressed about living in such a dangerous neighbourhood, and the reluctance of more ‘successful’ children to maintain strong contact with them.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all our informants for agreeing to participate in our study and for providing such open and rich accounts of their lives. We would also like to thank Gladys Costa for facilitating the interviews, and for providing invaluable background information and safe passage in the neighbourhood. Doctor Nélida Redondo provided much useful advice and gave us the initial contact with local social workers. Milena Aranciaba provided excellent general support as interview assistant, as well as transcribing and providing thoughtful inputs. The research was funded by the co-authors.
