The Elderly and Family Change in Asia with a Focus in Iran: A Sociological Assessment

Elderly people and families are attracting the attention of many social scientists nowadays. The paper tries to explore how much social change in Asia is affecting family structure, and how deep elderly people are influenced by this transition. The trend of these studies has been following various ageing referring to socioeconomic implications for those societies. A concept of ageing being followed in industrial societies is not well defined or touched in many of Asian societies yet. Rising challenges out of the phenomenon need due to find solutions to avoid further complications and controversies as far as a changing in family is concerned. Consequences brought from ageing such as: loneliness, loss of status, being apart from productive system and similarly reduction in quality of life could be sociologically tackled to harmonize the ageing phenomenon with family's responsibility. Hence, lowering family poverty would help much. Shortage of appropriate social security system in many of Asian societies, changing attitudes from youth towards elderly, change of family values system and their likes. All of those facts have led the elderly to poverty and inappropriate services at the ending stage of their life. The gap between the perceived need for assistance of the elderly and thir received assistance could be filled up by family and that should be what they traditionally expect. Iran is also facing this challenge due to rapid changes in family, mainly caused by the change in family relations whose values have ended. Hence, adequate policies need to be adopted to end up with the emerging challenge in Asia.$$aged society, family solidarity, gerontology, far/lat/modernization.