ABSTRACT
There is a strong presumption that within western Europe, kinship ties, including those between the elderly and their children, have weakened over the course of time. Individual instances of the neglect of the elderly by their close kin can certainly be found but these can be documented for societies in the past as well as for those in the present, while it is possible to counter every case of wilful neglect with another demonstrating support, financial, social or both (Laslett 1989: 127, 132). At a more general level both Frederic Le Play and Charles Booth collected data on mid-nineteenth-century Europe and late-nineteenth-century England and Wales respectively that demonstrated that the majority of the elderly in the societies studied were not financially dependent on their children (summarized in Wall 1992). Wealth more often passed down the generational chain rather than up, even during the life-time of those parents. There is also evidence, admittedly only from England, that the proportion of married children living within five miles of their parents and therefore close enough to permit regular contact, has not altered between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries (Wall 1992:73).
