A Study On The Subjective Well-being Of Rual Elders From Four Counties And Children Supports On It

China is an ageing country with the most aging people in the world and also encounters the fast aging growth. Elder people in rural areas are considered as the ineluctable vulnerable group, occupying 70% of 169 million elder people in China. Therefore, it is become a crucial topic to improve mental health of rural elder people, increase the family supports to them and create a comfortable environmental for their twilight years. It is shown by many studies home and abroad that the sense of subjective well-being remains the important indicator of evaluating elder people's mental heath and life quality. In this regard, it is of great importance to study elder people's sense of happiness.Social relation is a major factor influencing the subjective well-being. As we all know, family ties becomes the main social relations of elder people since family members is the one they interact with most. And the support and help from family members, especially from their children plays a very important role in elders' happiness. According to the previous studies in this field, most were conducted from the influencing factors of elders'happiness rather than from the perspective of children supports. Besides, samplings from previous studies are from city communities without considering rural elders.The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the subjective well-being and the conditions of Children supports for rural elders aged 60-70 through the day reconstruction method. It is hoped that this study will provide measures or policies for improving rural elders'happiness and life quality.Four counties from three provinces are selected for this study. They are AnYue county from Sichuan Province, CaoXian and ChiPing county from Shandong province and LinQuan from Anhui Province. According to the social economy and geography of these regions, Stratified random sampling was adopted and the surveyors are 546 people by the methodology of unvaried and multivariate analysis of factors conducted for statistic analysis.Key findings:(1) Basic living conditions of elders Around 40% of surveyors live separately from their children. They are physically well at movement, self-caring and daily activities while have problems of physical pain, uncomfortable feeling, anxiety or disappointment at certain level. The subjective health conditions for surveyors is good, however, half of them suffered from Insomnia and 60% from depression. The most frequent activities they are involved in are farm activities, cooking and house domestic work and their entertainments are lacking, only as watching TV, rests, chattings, exercises or readings.(2) Children supports for eldersEconomically support and daily care is lacking from elders' children, who, however, provide emotion support for their parents. From the perspective of elders: mothers will receive more supports from children than fathers. The more elder parents are the more support they will get. While the more children the parents have, the more support they will receive. And the number of son can not be a factor to evaluate how much supports elders have. From the perspective of children, sons will provide more economic or emotional supports than daughters while daughters will provide more life care to parents than sons. Children of non-migrate workers will provide more emotional or economic support for parents than Children of migrate workers, who, however, will provide more economic support than the former. Besides, the more educated the children are, the more emotional or economic support they will provide for parents and vise verse. And the richer the children are, the more supports they will provide, especially financially.(3) Investigate the conditions of elders' subjective well-being It is showed by day reconstruction method that index U of elders'is 7.8% with a high subjective well-being. And 84.6% of surveyors didn't have a negative mood. According to the three categories of activities, elders "things have to do" brought a low subjective well-being while entertainments provide a highest one, though they are lacking. Domestic works, cooking and farm activities of three categories of activities mentioned above constitute the daily activities of elders'life. And the low subjective well-being derived from going out, looking after grandchildren and farm activities. It is found done by unvaried analysis that four factors including self-evaluation of health conditions, educational level, insomnia and depression influence elders'subjective well-being. Multivariate analysis noticed that explainable variants of elders' subjective well-being consistence of scores of four factors mentioned above and is statistically significant, whereas other factors other than these four is not. (4) Effects of children supports for elders'subjective well-beingEmotional supports from children are of great influential effect on elders' subjective well-being. The more emotional supports elders received, the high subjective well-being they have and the more life satisfactions they enjoy. And financial support and life care is not as significant as emotional supports.Conclusion and Suggestions:First, social entertainments need to be developed at the community to enhance elders'chance to interact with the outside world. Second, the rural elders'sleep quality need to be improved to increase the subject well-being. Third, the active components of filial piety should be stressed and promoted and child's awareness of maintenance need to be enhanced. Fourth, social traditions should be transformed to encourage daughter's support, social pension and other new methods. Last but not least, government shall gradually strengthen the institutionalizational constraints and security of the rural elders'maintenance.