There is something uncomfortable about paying someone to spend time with you. Yet some of that discomfort belongs to the people looking on. For the person facing another long afternoon alone, an arranged visit may be considerably more useful than our unease.
BBC World reports that people in China are hiring themselves out as companions to older people, with some described as “temporary children”, in an emerging market for companionship. The supplied report does not establish how these arrangements work or how those involved feel about them. We should be wary of deciding, from a name alone, that everyone is being exploited, or that an ingenious solution has been found.
Still, the name deserves attention. A child occupies a place in someone’s life that cannot easily be specified by the hour. There is shared history, sometimes affection, sometimes resentment, and often a complicated sense of obligation. Calling a paid companion a temporary child brings all those expectations into a relationship whose terms may be quite different.
Payment need not make the attention worthless. We accept that paid carers can care sincerely. Someone earning a living can also be patient, interested and glad to see another person. To insist that companionship must be freely given before it counts would leave the lonely waiting for our moral requirements to be satisfied.
The more difficult question concerns what happens around that paid relationship. It can become tempting to treat a booked visit as evidence that somebody’s loneliness has been dealt with. A useful service then becomes an excuse for everyone else to withdraw.
That is a possibility, not a finding about the people in this report. Families may live far apart; relationships may already be damaged; some older people may prefer an arrangement they can choose and control. Kinship does not guarantee kindness, and nobody should have to endure an unpleasant relationship simply because it comes without an invoice.
But purchasing help should prompt us to look more closely at what remains ours to do. If a relative has companionship on Tuesday, that tells us very little about Wednesday, or whether they still want to hear our news, or have something they have been waiting to tell us.
Before assuming that someone has enough company, we might ask them. And leave enough time for the answer.