With an increasing number of elders moving into nursing homes, the shift from family to nursing home care calls for an exploration of caregiving decision-making in urban China. This study examines how a rapidly growing aging population, the one-child policy, and economic reform in urban China pose unprecedented challenges to the country's ingrained tradition of family caregiving. It presents interviews of matched elders and their children from a government-sponsored nursing home in Shanghai and analyzes the decision-making process of institutionalization. This book offers fresh insight into the evolving culture and arrangements of caregiving in contemporary Chinese society, illuminating the diverse needs for long-term care of Chinese elders-the world's largest aging population-in the coming decades.

1. Introduction: Too Great a Task: Taking Care of Aging Parents 2. The Setting: The Nursing Home and the Sociocultural Caregiving Context in Urban China 3. The Theoretical Lens: Conceptualizing the Decision-Making Process 4. Unexpected Reality: Etiology of Family Caregiving 5. Swinging Pendulum: A Power Play 6. Children Parenting: First and Last Adventure 7. The End of an Era: A New Dialogue