Cyber filial piety has gone viral, and you can pay only 300 yuan to place an order for a "son" to visit your home.

At 10 o'clock on Sunday morning, a knock on the door rings on time in the corridor.

The 84-year-old elderly woman living alone leans against the door frame, and asks the same question again: "Who are you?"

"I'm a friend of your daughter, I've come to visit you." Wei Zhenyu, a post-95 young man from Inner Mongolia, answers with a smile. This is his fixed part-time job every week: visiting the elderly to chat with them, charging 300 yuan per hour.

The old lady never knows that this "junior" who checks on her and helps her make cross-border video calls is a "shared child" hired with money by her daughter who lives far away in Canada.

Some netizens call this practice heartwarming, while others denounce it as outsourcing family affection, even children's care can be "shared"? With the rigid demand of 300 million elderly people, is this "shared children" accompanying business a blue ocean for elderly care, or a tepid business that is difficult to scale up?

A companionship business named "Children"

At present, there are mainly two forms of shared children services, one is the public welfare pairing initiated by communities, which is completely free of charge; the other is the commercial service with clear price tags in private social domains, with fees settled according to service duration and items.

Wei Zhenyu belongs to the latter group. His main job is urban planning. Affected by the downturn of the industry, he casually posted a post on social platforms to test the waters of "shared children" service, and unexpectedly became popular. He has set two iron rules for himself: 300 yuan per hour, only serving elderly people living alone who can take care of themselves, each service is limited to one hour to avoid excessive fatigue.

This job is far more than just chatting and heart-to-heart talks. The service list covers accompanying the elderly to see a doctor, errand running and purchasing on behalf of them, paying utility bills, teaching the elderly to use mobile phones, accompanying them to banks and government service halls, and even pretending to be their children to stand up for them when the elderly encounter disputes outside.

Akai, a practitioner in Dalian, originally ran a temporary bodyguard business. His first order in March 2025 was to take care of the 75-year-old mother of a daughter who married far away from home. The old lady, widowed and living alone, has her entire world limited to the space from the bed to the refrigerator in her one-bedroom apartment. The total price of this order is 2000 yuan, with 5 home visits per month, at least two hours each time, covering all trivial matters such as cooking, cleaning, household appliance maintenance and bill payment. In the first two visits, the old lady was neither welcoming nor resistant. As they got familiar with each other gradually, the old lady began to chatter nonstop about her children and her late husband, holding his hand with red eyes when he left and saying "Come again".

He has even played a more "real" child role. Grandpa Zhang in his 70s has his son's whole family living abroad all year round, and the neighbors gossip behind their backs, saying "He made a fortune but forgot his parents", "It's better not to have a child if he lives abroad". Akai visits the old man seven or eight times a month, and tells everyone he meets that he is the old man's "adopted son". This title of "adopted son" shut the neighbors up and saved the elder's face.

The price stratification of this industry is clear. Individual scattered orders generally cost 30 to 100 yuan per hour, and the hourly wage of team project orders is about 200 yuan. Those who have traffic on social platforms like Wei Zhenyu can get an hourly wage as high as 300 yuan, and private domain platforms charge by service category, with the average cost ranging from 300 to 2000 yuan per service.

The people who pay are not the elderly

To understand this business, we must first figure out who is paying for it.

Front-line practitioners generally feedback that most of the order placers are post-70s and post-80s children working in different places, or post-90s and post-00s grandchildren, with women accounting for more than 80%. The reason is not hard to understand. The older generation came through hard times, they would walk past three stalls just to save 20 cents when buying vegetables, and would rather endure loneliness than pay for "finding someone to talk to". Loneliness is a rigid demand, but the elderly have extremely low willingness to pay for it.

The service of companionship paid by children essentially buys two parts of emotional value: one is the peace of mind that "I am not in my hometown, but my parents have been properly taken care of", the other is the compensation for the guilt of not being able to return to hometown to fulfill filial piety.

Ms. Su from Guangdong had her father hospitalized, and she could not get away from work in other cities, so she hired a "shared child" online to accompany her father to see a doctor. As a result, her parents firmly refused to meet strangers, and finally she could only lie that "this is my friend coming to help", then the old people barely accepted the service.

The demand base for shared children services is large enough. Public data shows that by the end of 2025, the number of people aged 60 and above in China has reached 323 million, accounting for 23% of the total population; more than 90% of the elderly choose home-based elderly care, the number of empty-nest and elderly people living alone has exceeded 130 million, and nearly a quarter of the elderly are troubled by loneliness.

Large demand does not mean that this business can make stable profits. Community public welfare projects show another possibility. 82-year-old Zhang Guilan in Chaoyang, Beijing, lost her husband early, and her only daughter settled in Shanghai and can hardly come back once a year. She eats casually, goes to see a doctor alone, and even does not know how to complete the medical insurance authentication on her mobile phone. The community "shared children" program paired her with 22-year-old college student Lin Xiao, who visits her three times a week, pays utility bills, adjusts video calls, accompanies her to join the choir, and even wove a scarf for her by hand during the Spring Festival. The old lady praises everyone she meets: "She is more considerate than my own granddaughter, and my life finally has something to look forward to."

To put it bluntly, the companionship business of shared children sells the guilty filial piety of children working far away from home, and fills the emotional gap of empty-nest elderly who "want someone to care about them".

 Filial piety is expensive, but the business is very difficult

This filial piety business of shared children has high prices and full emotional value, but it develops in a very awkward way.

First of all, there is the risk of operating in a "three noes" unregulated environment. At present, most of the paid companionship services such as shared children are in a completely blank zone with no qualification requirements, no industry norms and no insurance coverage. Most practitioners have not received professional elderly care training, and they are often at a loss when the elderly fall down or have sudden illnesses. From a legal perspective, it is essentially paid labor and service contract, not statutory support obligation. Once personal injury or property disputes occur, it is very easy to get into endless disputes without written contracts, and there is no way to safeguard rights.

In addition, there is the boundary problem of trust and safety. Xiao Jiang, who has been working part-time in Jiangsu for three years, once sent a local specialty to an aunt he knew well, which was identified by the aunt's daughter as "getting too close", not only was he blocked, but also complained to the platform. Practitioners can get close to the elderly's private information such as address, property and medical history, and there have been chaos in the industry where people use the identity of caregivers to sell health products, induce the elderly to buy financial products. To avoid risks, the platform can only make mandatory rules: record the whole process, two people visit the elderly together, do not accept red envelopes, do not add private contact information in private.

The most delicate problem is the emotional misalignment. What the elderly expect is long-term warmth from their children and grandchildren, while what practitioners provide is short-term labor settled by the hour. Once the elderly develop deep emotional dependence on the caregivers, when the service expires or the practitioners leave their jobs, the elderly will suffer secondary emotional harm. Many community volunteers have been replaced by 4 batches within half a year, the elderly have to re-adapt to new people as soon as they build trust, and it is difficult for them to accept new people in the long run.

In the final analysis, companionship services such as shared children can help children complete errands, care and other affairs, but cannot replace the statutory support obligation, let alone replace the family reunion dinner sitting around the table, or the sentence "Mom, I'm back" at the door. What that 84-year-old elderly woman really needs is that her daughter comes back to visit her often.

Filial piety is expensive, the reason why it is expensive is that it is difficult to outsource, cannot be calculated by time and paid for, it can only be done in person.

This article is from WeChat Official Account "Financial Gossip Girl Channel" (ID: baguanvpindao), written by Zhi Zhi, authorized for release by 36Kr.