Filial Piety Travels

Filial piety is the umbrella term for children's respect, care, and duty toward parents. It is older than any single country's version of it, and it keeps changing.

One idea, many settings

Kyeong and colleagues describe filial piety as varying across sociocultural contexts and across the life span [Kyeong et al. (2025)]. In other words, what a twenty-year-old owes and what a forty-year-old owes may differ, and so may what a family in one country expects compared to another.

Ji examines how filial piety and intergenerational caregiving have been reshaped in early twenty-first century China [Ji (2025)]. Mamayson writes about the evolving concept of filial piety in the Philippines [Mamayson (2025)]. Zarzycki and colleagues reviewed how culture shapes the motivations of informal caregivers [Zarzycki et al. (2022)].

Across borders

Grava and colleagues looked at emotions in the transnational enactment of Filipino family obligation and utang na loob, through remittance-sending [Grava et al. (2026)]. That is a reminder that obligation can stretch across oceans, and that feelings travel with the money.

What this gives the study

It gives a reason for humility. Family obligation is not a single fixed thing, so the study measures it as the respondents themselves understand it, using a Filipino-language questionnaire.

Next: what happens when gratitude feels like pressure.