ABSTRACT
Where in the past material family support to older people was broadly sufficient, recent decades, as highlighted in the introduction to the case study, have witnessed apparent declines in the adequacy of such support. This chapter explains this decline and identifies the expectations for future family support emerging in its wake. The impacts of the declines in extended family and filial support for older people, who lack their own resources, were manifest in the deprivation experienced by the poor older generation respondents. With insufficient means to meet even their basic daily needs, most were dependent on charity—such as receiving a free meal at the HelpAge Ghana day center. The first, and major, shift that has underpinned the diminishing of support from extended relatives and adult children, as the respondents made clear, has been an erosion of the resource capacity of the middle generation to provide adequately for older parents or relatives.
