Study On The Issue Of Spiritual Elderly Care For Empty Nesters In Dalian

The issue of elderly care has been a crucial issue about people’s livelihood of great concern to our government all the time.In 2021,General Secretary Xi Jinping made an important speech on the occasion of the Chrysanthemum Day,mentioned that Party committees and governments across the board should carry out the national strategy to actively tackle population aging and enhance the work of the elderly and the elderly service system;at the same time,he also stressed the significance of promoting the virtue of filial devotion and respect for the elderly and bringing the role of the elderly into full and active play.For addressing the spiritual and cultural requirements of the elderly,based on a clear system of elderly care services,supervision and evaluation system,and coordinated development of industries,higher relevant requirements have been proposed by the “14th Five-Year Plan”.Moreover,the spiritual aging issue of various elderly groups represented by the empty nesters is getting more and more concern with the continuous development and promotion of elderly care cause in China.As one of the cities with early aging and a high proportion of empty nesters in China,Dalian,although the management of the spiritual aging problem of empty nesters has achieved certain results in recent years,there are still weak links in the levels of family spiritual support function,spiritual aging resources supply and demand,governmental support,and spiritual self-care of empty nesters,which is the reason why the spiritual aging cause in Dalian needs government,society,market,family,and the elderly themselves in the development process.At the same time,as an important constituent of the “big puzzle” of social livelihood,the continuous strengthening of spiritual elderly care service construction is a key reflection of the modernization of governance system in our country as well.This thesis takes the spiritual elderly care issue of the empty nesters as a point of entry,uses the literature research method,establishes the research framework and defines the underlying conception on the basis of extensive reading,organizing and analyzing the literature related to spiritual elderly care both nationally and internationally,and uses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory,multiple welfarism theory and public goods theory as the main theoretical foundation for issue identification,cause analysis and countermeasure proposal;uses the in-depth interview method,and conducts in-depth interviews with 10 empty nesters,4 children of empty nesters,2 nursing institution staffs and 2 community staffs from 5 representative communities in Dalian,and found that the lack of children’s emotional comfort has become the norm,the conflict between supply and demand of spiritual elderly care,the inadequate contribution of government resources in spiritual elderly care and the monotonous content of spiritual and cultural life of the empty nesters in Dalian.The causes for these problems are the weakening of family spiritual support function,the mismatch between supply and demand of spiritual elderly care resources,the deficiency of governmental support for spiritual elderly care and the absence of spiritual self-supporting ability of the empty nesters;by means of using the comparative analysis method,the progressive experiences and practices of Japan and Hangzhou are introduced and compared to provide inspiration and reference for the formulation of corresponding countermeasures.Finally,this thesis proposes four countermeasures to ameliorate and enhance the spiritual elderly care of the empty nesters in Dalian: firstly,mechanism guarantee and cultural construction to awaken the awareness of social spiritual elderly care;secondly,demand-oriented optimization of social spiritual elderly care resources allocation;thirdly,government-led creation of a cooperative system of multiple spiritual elderly care supply bodies;fourthly,self-adaptation of the empty nesters to improve their spiritual self-nurturing ability.