Grown-up children who fail to visit their elderly parents, or who do not attend to their “spiritual needs”, will henceforth face the prospect of fines or even prison, under China’s new “Elderly Rights Law”, an attempt to deal with the country’s rapidly ageing population. The legislation compels citizens to address the daily financial and spiritual needs of parents who have reached the age of 60 – and to visit them “frequently”. The move is a response to a surge in reports of elderly people facing abuse and hardship – but has been widely mocked on social media as overly vague and impossible to enforce. (The Week)

Well, quite! In the West we long ago gave up expecting younger people to attend to the “daily financial and spiritual needs” of their elders. “Spiritual needs?” The best many people can expect is to be housed in an old person’s home, where you are sedated to keep you quiet and stuck in front of the telly all day in a smelly room with intermittent meals of boiled cabbage and mashed potatoes. (I am grossly exaggerating – kindly, loving Epicurean offspring would never dream of shutting their elders up in such a place).

You can’t legislate for your relatives to love you or care for you, and, speaking personally, the last thing I would want in the world is for my sons to cater to my “spiritual needs”. In any case I am not sure I want my children to see me infirm. I would like them to remember me full of life and a bundle of laughs.