Running parallel are the urban elderly who are more prepared to live separately but pleased to accept the support of children, when necessary.

I say elderly. But what is elderly? Retiring at 55? Does that make you elderly? Very much a matter of mind over matter: think old then you will be old.

There is a growing urban realization in contrast to rural, of the compensations of growing "old"; more time to exchange ideas, visit museums, read, attend community colleges, learn new skills. The list could be endless.

Far from being dependent on their progeny, many couples are branching out and leaving their children behind! In Shanghai, 32 per cent of families have elders aged 60 and over, who live apart from their families, according to Gui Shixun's Demographic Research Institute. Fifty nine per cent of these are couples, the remainder widowed.

True, the pressures on the female offspring of a one-child family are great. For too long the city government has taken this devotion for granted.

There are two ways of looking at this.

With increasing withdrawal of children's support, their parents will have to try to cope alone.

Not such a bad thing. Satisfaction can be derived from autonomy. Too much familiarity between generations harms relationships which may otherwise thrive on a little healthy neglect!

The young will appreciate their parents' increasing independence, learn to stand on their own feet and be more willing to help their elders occasionally, both thriving on new-found freedom.

It works both ways. It is not such a bad thing to learn to cook, clean and pay one's own bills!

In Liverpool, UK, a community discovered a strange phenomenon.

The idea of gambling on the results of football matches, known as Football Pools, was widely practised for a small fee which most households could afford and the Liverpool office, staffed by young women, checked the coupons late into each Saturday night.

Saturday night "hops" where most romances began, were out of the question, so they missed out with the boys. Inevitably, there grew in that locality a community of spinsters who stayed at home, later becoming the sole carers of their elderly parents.

It had a knock-on effect.

There were fewer babies, fewer pupils, teachers, closed schools, resigned midwives(!), a diminished population and the community all but died. And all this, the result of the efforts of two young brothers playing about with bits of squared paper who were my mother's neighbours in Liverpool.

Their unique idea eventually became a gamble in which most families, nationwide, participated and lived in hope! It made John and Cecil Moore millionaires almost overnight, repaying their city in kind by establishing Liverpool John Moore University from which I graduated many years later.

So the wheel turned and although my mother did not marry Cecil, her childhood sweetheart, in a strange twist of fate, he became my benefactor.

The only plus for the deprived community which the brothers had inadvertently created, was the accumulation of Community Health Credit. It could have financed the last, failing years of the spinsters who had no-one to care for them and who, in the years between the World Wars had neither the income or the spirit to improve their lot.

With the surging number of DINK'ies in Shanghai (double income, no kids), there will be a similar problem.

Hitherto it was a Western phenomenon. It is advancement of a sort and I would like to think that communities will benefit: less mouths to feed, more-manageable population.

But in truth, it is greed which motivates.

I wonder what those Liverpool spinsters who were always the bridesmaid, never the bride, would have to say about that.

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