When Moralism Isn’t Policy:
Why Panfilo Lacson's “Parents Welfare Act of 2025”
Risks Doing More Harm Than Good
In early 2025, Senator Panfilo “Ping” Lacson refiled his proposed Parents Welfare Act, a bill that seeks to impose criminal penalties on children who abandon or fail to support their aging, sick, or incapacitated parents. Citing the erosion of traditional Filipino family values and invoking the increasing visibility of elderly individuals living in neglect, Lacson described the bill as a moral corrective to a social crisis that, in his view, has gone unchecked.
But critics argue that while the bill may be cloaked in concern for the elderly, it fails to engage with the structural realities that shape elder care in the Philippines. More than anything, it reflects a dangerous trend among lawmakers: relying on moralistic legislation in place of comprehensive policy.
Codifying “Filial Duty” Without Context
At the heart of the Parents Welfare Act, currently under discussion in the Philippine legislature, lies a controversial premise: that familial responsibility—particularly from adult children to their elderly parents—can be codified, enforced, and criminalized when neglected. The bill proposes to legally obligate children to provide financial and emotional support to aging parents, with penalties such as fines or imprisonment for non-compliance. While the intent may stem from concerns over the welfare of the elderly, this initiative transforms a historically moral and cultural duty into a state-enforced legal requirement.
This raises serious questions, both legal and ethical. It touches upon issues of autonomy, class inequality, gender roles, and state overreach into the private domain of family life. Moreover, it risks universalizing the ideal of "filial piety" without adequately addressing the social and economic conditions that shape intergenerational care.
The Cultural Roots of Filial Piety—and Its Limits
Filial piety (utang na loob, xiao, oyakō kōkō) is a well-known value in many Asian cultures, including the Philippines, where extended families and intergenerational solidarity are still strong in rural and working-class contexts. Traditionally, children are expected to care for aging parents as a form of gratitude and reciprocal duty. But legal scholar Jonathan K. Ocko and historian David Gilmartin have noted that the legal codification of filial piety in Confucian societies was always fraught with tension between morality and enforceability.
In societies like the Philippines, where this value is embedded more in informal kinship networks than in codified law, turning this expectation into a statutory obligation may undermine the very moral basis on which it stands. It shifts the basis of care from love and loyalty to fear of punishment—a fundamental alteration of the familial bond.
Legal Mandates vs. Structural Support
Critics argue that enforcing support obligations without providing adequate state welfare mechanisms is a way of offloading public responsibility onto private citizens. Instead of improving pensions, expanding elderly care services, or developing universal health care, the law would penalize poor or estranged children—many of whom may themselves be struggling to survive.
According to sociologist Vicente Rafael, this reflects how the Philippine state often “relies on familialism as a substitute for state accountability”. The Philippines, like many Southeast Asian nations, lacks a robust eldercare infrastructure. As of 2023, the country allocated only around 0.7% of GDP to social protection programs, compared to over 6% in some OECD countries.
Criminalization and Coercion: A Legal and Moral Misstep
Transforming moral obligations into legal imperatives also risks weaponizing the law in cases of family conflict. Legal experts have warned that such laws could be abused by manipulative parents or by local officials seeking to exploit family dynamics for political ends.
The Philippines is not alone in experimenting with this approach. India, Bangladesh, Singapore, and China have all passed some version of a Maintenance of Parents Act. But in practice, enforcement is patchy, selective, and often entangles already broken or dysfunctional family relationships in court systems ill-equipped to handle emotional grievances.
For instance, Singapore’s Maintenance of Parents Act (1995) allows elderly parents to sue their children for financial support. Yet many choose not to, fearing stigma, family backlash, or prolonged litigation. Similarly, China’s 2013 amendment to its elder law required children to “visit often,” but faced ridicule and implementation issues due to vagueness.
Gender and Class Implications
Laws like the Parents Welfare Act also risk reinforcing gendered caregiving norms, where daughters—often un- or underpaid—bear the brunt of familial responsibility. Moreover, they overlook how poverty and migration complicate these duties. Millions of Filipino children of aging parents now live abroad or in informal urban labor sectors without the resources to provide steady support.
Instead of criminalizing poor children, critics suggest that elder welfare should be a public, not just private, responsibility—through pensions, affordable health care, housing subsidies, and inclusive community care centers.
Filial care, when freely given, is beautiful. But when coerced by law, it risks becoming oppressive. The Parents Welfare Act, while well-intentioned, represents a moral shortcut to social policy. It shifts blame onto individuals without addressing the structural and institutional roots of elder poverty and neglect.
Policymakers would do well to heed this distinction: a society that truly values its elders must invest in them—not just legislate love from their children.
Lacking the Backbone of Welfare Infrastructure:
A Hollow Mandate for Intergenerational Support
Supporters of the proposed Parents Welfare Act in the Philippines often cite Singapore as a model, pointing to its Maintenance of Parents Act (1995), which enables elderly parents to legally claim financial support from their adult children through a special tribunal. At first glance, such a measure may seem like a practical way to reinforce intergenerational responsibility. But policy experts and social scientists have repeatedly warned that comparisons to Singapore are not only misleading—they are dangerously incomplete if stripped from the broader socioeconomic context that supports such laws.
Singapore’s policy is not a standalone directive. It functions within the framework of an extensive, state-managed welfare infrastructure, which provides dignified aging, income security, and healthcare access. These systems are critical in ensuring that the burden of eldercare does not fall solely on families—especially on low-income households—nor become a punitive tool for criminalizing familial failure in a setting of broader institutional neglect.
Singapore’s Welfare Architecture for the Elderly: A Systemic Approach
To fully appreciate the limitations of the Philippine proposal, it is essential to understand the foundation upon which Singapore’s model is built. The Maintenance of Parents Act operates in concert with a comprehensive suite of social protection policies:
- The Central Provident Fund (CPF): A compulsory national savings scheme that requires both employer and employee contributions, covering retirement, housing, and medical needs. CPF ensures that most Singaporeans enter old age with a personal nest egg, reducing total dependency on children. (CPF Board)
- The Retirement and Re-employment Act: This law mandates employers to offer re-employment to workers up to the age of 67, enabling older adults to remain productive and financially independent. (Ministry of Manpower)
- The Silver Support Scheme: A direct cash transfer program for the bottom 20–30% of senior citizens, disbursing quarterly allowances to those with insufficient retirement savings. (MSF Silver Support)
- Affordable and accessible public housing and healthcare: Over 80% of Singaporeans live in government-subsidized housing, while older adults receive additional grants, priority access to elder-friendly flats, and heavy subsidies for healthcare through MediShield Life and CHAS.
These programs ensure that elderly Singaporeans are not entirely dependent on their children for survival. As such, the Maintenance of Parents Act serves more as a moral safeguard or safety valve, used primarily in exceptional cases—not as the main pillar of elderly welfare.
The Philippine Gap: Absence of a Social Safety Net
By contrast, the Philippines lacks the systemic scaffolding necessary to make similar laws just or effective. Without a strong welfare foundation, legal obligations to support parents may disproportionately punish the poor and vulnerable—those least capable of compliance, and most likely to be criminalized.
- Limited Pension Coverage: According to a 2021 World Bank report, only about 38% of Filipino elderly are covered by either the Social Security System (SSS) or the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) (World Bank, 2021). This leaves the majority of senior citizens dependent on informal support from family, religious institutions, or local government dole-outs.
- Inadequate Health Coverage: PhilHealth, the government’s national health insurance provider, has long faced issues of underfunding, inefficiency, and corruption. In 2023, the Commission on Audit (COA) reported billions of pesos in unpaid claims to public and private hospitals, undermining trust in the system and severely disrupting healthcare access for older Filipinos who rely on public hospitals for chronic care and emergency treatment (COA, 2023).
- Absence of Cash Transfer Programs for Seniors: While there are some local government incentives like the senior citizen’s discount or occasional financial assistance, there is no national equivalent to Singapore’s Silver Support Scheme that provides predictable, needs-based cash assistance to poor elderly citizens.
- Precarious Employment and Informal Labor: Most adult children who would be legally mandated to support their parents work in the informal economy or are underemployed. The Philippine Statistics Authority estimates that over 30 million Filipinos are in informal jobs as of 2024—without stable income, social insurance, or employer support. Criminalizing failure to support one’s parents in such a context risks penalizing economic reality, not moral failure.
Legal Burden Without State Support: A Regressive Policy Path
The implication is clear: in Singapore, laws like the Maintenance of Parents Act are built atop a robust framework that empowers both elderly citizens and their adult children through policy, not punishment. In the Philippines, enacting a similar law without replicating the broader support systems would result in a regressive policy—one that increases social pressure without providing social protection.
Rather than enabling dignified aging, the Parents Welfare Act could function as a legal escape clause for a government unwilling to invest in universal healthcare, pension reform, or elder housing. Instead of creating public systems that support old age as a social responsibility, it turns aging into a private liability enforced through criminal sanctions.
If the Philippines wishes to strengthen intergenerational solidarity, it must start not with coercive laws but with institutional reforms: expand universal pension coverage, fund public hospitals reliably, improve PhilHealth, and introduce targeted cash transfers for the elderly poor.
Legislating moral duty without providing material support is not justice—it is abdication. In the absence of a real welfare backbone, the Parents Welfare Act risks being less about care and more about control.
A Disproportionate Burden on the Youth:
Moral Duty in an Unequal Economy
The proposed Parents Welfare Act presumes that adult children—regardless of socioeconomic standing—can and should assume legal and financial responsibility for their aging parents. But this assumption fails to account for the harsh economic realities faced by Filipino youth, who would bear the brunt of this legal mandate.
Far from being an ungrateful generation shirking tradition, many young Filipinos today are caught in a triple crisis of precarity: unstable work, limited income, and the rising cost of living. To criminalize their inability to support their parents is not only unfair—it is structurally blind and morally cruel.
Bleak Labor Market Realities for the Young
According to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) in its 2024 Labor Force Survey:
- Youth unemployment (ages 15–24) stood at 12.2%, nearly three times the national average of 4.1%.
- Underemployment among the same group—those working but seeking additional income—remained alarmingly high at 22%.
- Over 52% of households reported reliance on informal or irregular income, with many young people engaged in gig work, daily wage labor, or unregistered micro-entrepreneurship. (PSA, 2024)
This paints a stark picture: the majority of young people do not enjoy job security, stable incomes, or access to employer-based benefits. Many work without contracts, social insurance, or health coverage—meaning they’re barely making ends meet for themselves, let alone positioned to legally support elderly dependents.
Already Carrying the Load: The Myth of Youth Irresponsibility
There’s a dangerous misconception embedded in the proposed bill: that young people are neglecting their elders out of selfishness or moral decay. In reality, many young Filipinos are already serving as de facto breadwinners, often juggling the care of parents, younger siblings, nieces, nephews, or even their own children—all while navigating economic insecurity.
The Asian Development Bank notes that intergenerational dependency flows downward in poorer households in Southeast Asia: young adults support not just parents, but entire extended kin networks, often without any state assistance (ADB, 2022). In such contexts, the expectation of upward support becomes unrealistic, even abusive, when imposed by law.
To imagine that a tricycle driver earning P300 a day, or a call center agent working night shifts to feed three siblings, can be jailed for failing to send money to a parent with whom they may no longer live or speak—this is not justice, it’s state-imposed guilt enforced through criminal law.
Intergenerational Inequality: The Rise of the “Sandwich Generation”
Young adults today are being squeezed from both ends—caught between caring for aging parents and raising younger kin, all while struggling to build their own futures. Sociologists have termed this group the “sandwich generation”, and in low-income countries like the Philippines, it is particularly burdened.
Meanwhile, older generations often had more access to secure employment, land inheritance, or stable government jobs—opportunities now increasingly rare for today’s youth due to neoliberal labor reforms, globalization, and automation.
The younger generation faces:
- Stagnant real wages: Minimum wages have not kept pace with inflation, eroding purchasing power.
- Housing insecurity: Skyrocketing rental costs and informal settlements are the norm, especially in urban areas.
- Educational debt and job mismatch: Many young workers are overqualified for their jobs or working outside their fields of study, limiting career advancement and long-term earnings.
In short, the youth are being asked to support a generation who, while often themselves disadvantaged, came of age in relatively more stable economic conditions—without receiving reciprocal structural support to do so.
Criminalizing Poverty, Not Neglect
The proposed bill, by criminalizing “neglect” of parents, conflates material inability with moral failure. It ignores the reality that the majority of “non-support” cases stem not from indifference, but from deep-seated inequality and systemic disempowerment.
Legal scholar Amita Dhanda argues in similar contexts that “criminalizing familial non-performance in unequal economies tends to punish the poor for the state’s own failures” (Dhanda, 2014). Without social protections like universal pensions, living wages, and accessible housing, the law functions less as a safety net and more as a mechanism of coercion and shame.
For many young Filipinos, the dream of supporting one’s parents in old age is not absent—it is simply unattainable under current conditions. What they need is not guilt or punishment, but policies that:
- Raise real wages and ensure job security
- Expand youth employment and entrepreneurship programs
- Provide affordable housing and health care
- Ensure the elderly have dignified pensions and access to care
Only then can intergenerational care be practiced freely, not under threat of imprisonment. Until that day, laws like the Parents Welfare Act merely shift state responsibility onto the shoulders of the overburdened—and punish them when they collapse under the weight.
The Problem with Moral Appeals in Policy-Making:
Culture and Values, Morals is Not a Substitute for Policies involving Social Protection
Lacson, in defending the proposed Parents Welfare Act, anchored his rationale in a familiar refrain: Filipino family values. “We, Filipinos, are well-known for our close family ties,” he declared—an appeal meant to invoke cultural pride and moral tradition. But critics argue that while cultural values can inform policy, they must not replace it, and certainly must not be used to paper over institutional neglect.
At stake here is not whether filial piety is good—but whether moral duty should be made legally enforceable under conditions of economic inequality, limited public services, and structural poverty. By framing the issue in cultural terms, the bill shifts attention from the state’s responsibility to its citizens to individual failings within families—a rhetorical sleight of hand that replaces public accountability with private guilt.
The Dangers of “Cultural Policy-Making” Without Infrastructure
Appealing to values such as utang na loob (debt of gratitude) or pakikipagkapwa (relational empathy) may resonate emotionally, but as legal scholar Ambeth Ocampo and others have pointed out, culture is dynamic, context-specific, and not a coherent policy framework. To legislate based on idealized notions of “Filipino-ness” is to ignore the diverse lived experiences of millions of families, especially those fractured by:
- Poverty and internal migration
- Family violence or abuse
- Overseas labor and long-term separation
- Dysfunction, abandonment, or generational trauma
In many such cases, the breakdown of familial support systems is not a moral collapse—it is a survival response to decades of systemic failure. Criminalizing non-support in such contexts isn’t enforcing values—it’s weaponizing them against the poor.
The Global Consensus: Support, Not Sanctions
International human rights frameworks offer a sharp contrast to the punitive model implied in the bill. The United Nations Principles for Older Persons (1991), adopted by the UN General Assembly, outlines a vision of aging based on empowerment and state obligation—not family policing. The five core areas include:
- Independence – access to food, water, shelter, health care, and income
- Participation – opportunities for elderly to remain integrated in society
- Care – protection from neglect and access to institutional and community support
- Self-fulfillment – access to education and cultural life
- Dignity – freedom from exploitation and the right to be treated with respect
Nowhere in these principles is there support for criminalizing adult children who are unable—or unwilling—to support their elderly parents. On the contrary, the document emphasizes public responsibility, universal services, and the dignity of choice for both elders and their families. (UN, 1991)
There is also no international precedent among democratic societies for treating familial estrangement or lack of financial support as a criminal offense. Where family obligations exist in law (such as in parts of India, Singapore, or China), they are framed as civil, not criminal, matters—and even then, their enforcement is patchy and controversial, precisely because they conflict with modern understandings of autonomy and structural justice.
Moralism as a Distraction from State Responsibility
In this context, critics argue that appeals to Filipino values function less as moral guidance and more as deflections from government accountability. By invoking tradition, the bill sidesteps uncomfortable but urgent policy questions:
- Why does the Philippines have such low pension coverage for its elderly?
- Why is PhilHealth underfunded and failing to pay hospital claims?
- Why do millions of young Filipinos remain unemployed or underemployed, with no capacity to support anyone but themselves?
- Why is there no national eldercare strategy, even as the population ages rapidly?
Rather than confronting these issues with structural reforms, the law would shift the burden onto already-struggling families—and then criminalize them for failing to do what the state itself refuses to do.
This is especially dangerous in a political climate where moral rhetoric can justify legal coercion. Once familial “duty” is treated as a matter of state enforcement, what stops future laws from criminalizing other forms of moral noncompliance—disobedient children, unmarried adults, estranged siblings?
Cultural values may inspire laws, but they cannot serve as their legal foundation—especially when deployed selectively and in service of punitive agendas. What the Parents Welfare Act represents is a deeper tension in Philippine governance: the tendency to moralize poverty instead of confronting the material conditions that produce it.
Instead of criminalizing the children of the poor, the state must guarantee that no elder lives in hunger or neglect—not because they are loved, but because they are citizens.
Toward Real Solutions: What the Elderly and the Family Actually Need
The proposed Parents Welfare Act rests on a punitive logic: that if families—particularly adult children—fail to provide for their elderly parents, the state must step in and punish them. But experts, advocates, and development practitioners argue that this is both ineffective and unjust, especially in a country where the conditions necessary for healthy, reciprocal intergenerational care have never been fully established.
Rather than criminalizing individuals who are already economically burdened, the state should be working to build systems that allow families and elders to thrive, rooted in dignity, autonomy, and material support. Below are four areas where meaningful, rights-based reform can take place—addressing the root causes of elder poverty and family strain rather than treating the symptoms with coercive legislation.
1. Universal Social Pensions: From Tokenism to Sufficiency
Currently, the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) offers a ₱500 monthly social pension to indigent senior citizens under its Social Pension for Indigent Senior Citizens Program (DSWD, 2023). While well-intentioned, this amount—roughly $9 a month—is grossly inadequate in the face of rising food, housing, and medicine costs.
Groups like HelpAge International, have called for a universal, non-means-tested pension that provides a basic living income to all elderly citizens, regardless of previous employment status. Research shows that universal pensions:
- Reduce dependency on family members
- Improve nutrition and healthcare access
- Enable autonomy and dignity
- Are administratively simpler and less prone to corruption than targeted programs
Countries such as Thailand, Bolivia, and South Africa have already implemented such systems with measurable success.
2. Community-Run Elder Care Centers: Supporting the Family, Not Replacing It
Filipino families often serve as the primary caregivers for aging parents, but they do so with minimal institutional support. In many cases, caregivers are unpaid, undertrained, and emotionally overwhelmed—leading to burnout, intergenerational tension, and even neglect.
Publicly funded, community-run elder care centers could relieve pressure on families by providing:
- Daily meals and nutrition monitoring
- Social and recreational activities to combat isolation
- Basic healthcare and medication management
- Respite care and caregiver training programs
Such models exist successfully in Japan and South Korea, where day-care-style centers operate within barangays and provide aging adults with social interaction and supervised care while their children are at work. In the Philippines, some LGUs (local government units) have piloted similar programs, but they remain underfunded and unscaled.
Expanding this model nationally would create jobs in caregiving, uplift community health infrastructure, and restore dignity to elderly citizens—without criminalizing their children.
3. Incentivized Caregiving: Recognizing and Valuing the Invisible Labor
In Germany, family caregivers who provide long-term support to aging relatives are given stipends, tax breaks, and access to training programs through a national long-term care insurance scheme. Scandinavian countries, too, offer subsidies, housing allowances, and flexible work arrangements for family caregivers.
In the Philippines, caregiving within the family is often taken for granted—and disproportionately falls on women. By introducing incentives and legal recognition for unpaid family care work, the state could:
Offer tax deductions or direct subsidies for families caring for elders
Support caregiver leave policies under labor law
Provide skills training and mental health support for caregivers
This would not only reduce economic stress, but also restore a sense of agency and fairness to families providing essential but unpaid services.
4. Retirement Reform for Informal Workers: Closing the Coverage Gap
The Social Security System (SSS) provides retirement and health benefits to private-sector workers, while the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) does so for public employees. However, as of 2023, only about 20% of informal workers were contributing to SSS (SSS, 2023)—leaving the vast majority of workers outside formal safety nets.
Given that around 70% of the Philippine labor force works in the informal economy—farmers, vendors, drivers, freelancers—this is a massive structural gap.
To improve long-term elder welfare, policymakers must:
- Simplify enrollment procedures for informal workers and micro-entrepreneurs
- Offer government matching contributions or subsidies for low-income contributors
- Integrate informal worker coverage with community-based cooperatives or digital platforms
- Increase awareness through targeted campaigns and barangay-level outreach
Without expanding retirement coverage, future generations of elderly citizens will continue to enter old age without any pension, thus perpetuating dependence on family and the criminalization of its absence.
If the goal of the Parents Welfare Act is to uphold the dignity of elderly Filipinos, then punitive enforcement is the wrong tool for the job. Instead of criminalizing children for failing to uphold filial duty, the Philippine government should focus on institutionalizing elder care, strengthening social pensions, expanding labor protections, and investing in public services that relieve—not transfer—burdens from one generation to the next.
As experts have long emphasized: compassion is not law, and law is not a substitute for policy. Real support for families and the elderly begins with systems, not sentences.
Conclusion: Care, Not Coercion
While Senator Panfilo Lacson’s concern for the elderly and the family may well be sincere, the Parents Welfare Act of 2025 is a misguided response to a structural problem. It confuses moral obligation with legal duty, and worse, uses the law to enforce a version of care that many Filipino families simply cannot afford.
By criminalizing poverty and estrangement, the bill does not protect the elderly—it penalizes their children, many of whom are already overburdened, unemployed, or underpaid. The law assumes a level playing field that does not exist. In practice, it will punish the poor, not the negligent; the vulnerable, not the indifferent. It risks turning economic hardship into a criminal offense and using the courts as a substitute for social welfare.
More dangerously, the bill lets the state abdicate its responsibility. It allows the government to invoke family values as a smokescreen for policy failure. Instead of building systems of elder care—universal pensions, public health services, caregiving support—it shifts the burden to families and then criminalizes them for falling short.
This is a legal maneuver masquerading as a moral crusade. It plays on cultural sentiments of utang na loob and filial piety, but in doing so, it weaponizes love and duty as tools of control. It also ignores those seniors who have suffered abuse, abandonment, or trauma—many of whom want safety, not reconciliation, and dignity, not forced dependency.
As social policy scholar Shahra Razavi once put it: “Care is a public good, not a private charity.” Real solutions will not come from guilt or criminal penalties, but from investing in systems that respect autonomy, enable family solidarity, and protect everyone—regardless of their income, history, or family structure.
To put it bluntly: children are not retirement plans.
What elderly Filipinos need is not forced reconciliation, but real, sustainable, rights-based support systems: dignified pensions, access to affordable health care, community-based elder care centers, and protections from exploitation. Families need job security, housing, and social safety nets—not more pressure and legal threats.
The state’s job is not to shame citizens into caregiving—it is to build the conditions where caregiving is possible, dignified, and supported.
Let us be clear:
Let’s stop using morality to cover up policy failure.
The government’s job is to care for everyone—
not to guilt-trip us into doing what they should have planned for.
***
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