Family Life Cycle,Changes In Family Structure And Old-age Poverty

With the social and economic development and the implementation of the family planning policy, China’s family life cycle and family structure occurred great changes. Facing serious challenges traditional family pension, old-age poverty is becoming increasingly prominent. In order to understand the process and causes of the poor elderly to poverty, we carried out the study from the perspective of the family life cycle.In this study, we have used the method of empirical research, selected six rural poor elderly in XL Village in Hunan Province as the research object, and used the theory of the family life cycle and life course to study their diversified family life trajectory characteristics. We found that with the evolution of the family life cycle, elderly people are more likely to encounter a variety of economic factors, institutional and social factors and these disadvantages maybe lead them into poverty. Some of the events in the history of the family life of the elderly, such as:married, widowed, maternity, children start a family, to work, migration, career changes, retirement, aging, political events and other events might have different influence to the poverty of the elderly, and these life events may contact and influence each other. Figure6webs,9tables,66references.