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A long-established cultural norm of filial piety may cause ambivalent feelings for adult children who are considered the primary caregivers for their elderly parents in Turkish culture, and whose parents have been placed into nursing homes. The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight to the lived experiences of adult children of elderly people living in a nursing home in Turkey.

Drawing upon dramaturgical theory and phenomenological methodology, the authors conducted interviews with ten adult children whose elderly parents had been admitted to a nursing home in Izmir, Turkey. Multi-stage purposeful random sampling was used as the sampling scheme. Thematic analysis was performed to interpret the data.

Three themes emerged from the data: adult children’s coping strategies, the ways in which the adult children rationalize their decisions, and the ways in which the adult children manage the placement process. The interviews revealed that the adult children often feel like social outcasts and experience a wide range of difficulties, including social pressures, their own inner dilemmas, and negotiations with their elderly parents.

An exploration for the lived experiences of adult children relating to the nursing home placement of their elderly parents contributes an insight about the well-established cultural norms that produce feelings of ambivalence.

Human life course is shaped by a set of consecutive roles, such as being a worker, a spouse and a parent in a standard biography. However, being instantly disengaged from any of these roles may cause devastating effects on people’s lives. This discontinuity not only influences the very dynamics of the meaning of working, but also causes aging labor force to be excluded from the market economy. Experienced workers are drained from the pool of labor force just because they are old. This study aims at focusing on the effects of compulsory retirement both upon individual and upon structure, through the lenses of Political Economy of Aging (PEA) and Human Resources Management (HRM). The PEA perspective proposes a tripartite relationship among state (politics), market (economy) and individual (society), while HRM perspective provides an insight of an effective use of workforce from different generations, including older generation.