Navigating aging and health with limited family ties across societies: Challenges, adaptations, and policy responses

This overview introduces a special issue on aging with limited family ties, developed from an international workshop held at the National University of Singapore in February 2025. The special issue brings together nine articles examining how older adults navigate later life with constrained family availability across Brazil, rural China, India, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, and a 25-country cross-national sample. The papers examine diverse forms of limited family ties, including childlessness, spouselessness, kinlessness, sonlessness, and sole family survivorship, and consider their implications for health, mortality, subjective well-being, social connection, advance care planning, and anticipated living arrangements. This overview synthesizes three key lessons. First, limited family ties should not be treated as a homogeneous experience, as different missing family ties carry distinct meanings and support implications. Second, the consequences of limited family ties are conditional rather than uniformly negative, which produces vulnerability in some contexts while also prompting adaptation and planning in others. Third, the capacity to adapt among older adults with limited family ties depends on available resources and relationships, which are further shaped by gender, socioeconomic resources, cultural norms, and formal or informal support options. This article concludes by outlining future research and policy directions for building more inclusive care, housing, health, and planning systems for older adults with diverse family circumstances.