The Hindu Business Line : Filial fickleness

HOW often do old parents with children in faraway places wait wistfully for telephone calls, only to be disappointed? Even worse are times when they tell others that their son from San Francisco or daughter from Dundee is due to visit them next summer even when they know such promises are often not kept. A recent study shows that economic success in life makes children 20 per cent less likely to phone their mothers regularly and even less likely at 50 per cent to pay them a visit.

An apocryphal story is told of an elderly man calling his son in New York and telling him: "I hate to ruin your day, but your mother and I are divorcing. Forty-five years of misery is enough! I'm sick of her, and I'm sick of talking about this, so call your sister in Boston and tell her".

The son frantically calls his sister, who goes nuts upon hearing this and calls up the parents: "You are not getting a divorce! And I will be there tomorrow. Until then, don't do a single thing, do you hear me?" The father hangs up the phone, turns to his wife, and says: "It worked! The kids are coming for a visit, and they're paying their own way!"

The subject of family values or, more precisely, parent-child relationship in the context of inheritance has been of considerable interest to economists who attempt to find a balance in human behaviour between altruism and the sense of intuitive fairness.

For example, a study of wills and testaments has revealed that although less well-off children will expect to be bequeathed more, in practice, parents tend to distribute their estate equally among all. It is a bit ironical, though, that people should do so when most of them would want a taxation regime that collects money from the rich to provide support for the poor.

Dr John Ermisch, an Essex economist, believes that as the income of the children rises the marginal cost of providing services to parents goes up since affluence tends to increase distances between parents and children. Another reason, according to him, is that the children provide only enough services to ensure they get a reasonable share of inheritance. In families with fewer children this point is reached soon.

Conversely, Steven Landburgh, author of The Armchair Economist, postulates another theory which finds that parents are governed by a "strategic bequest motive." The parents use their estates to purchase attention from their grown children. The threat of disinheritance keeps those children in line; while the threat is effective, nobody is actually disinherited.

If this theory were true, you would expect parents with a lot of bequeathable wealth (stocks, bonds, etc.) to get far more visits from their children than parents with an equal amount of non-bequeathable wealth (such as pensions). "That prediction has been tested and found accurate, which is one good reason to believe the theory".

One way parents can ensure attention from children is to have lots of them. For most of us, perhaps, it is a bit too late for that. In any case, what parents should not do is clear. They should not "make King Lear's mistake of handing over the cash first".

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