HE is one of my favourite poets, yet I always wince at Philip Larkin’s famously sour lines, “They f**k you up your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do”. I doubt a child exists who could not pick some fault with their parents yet, with the exception of the unlucky, most of us have much more reason to be grateful than to complain.

These days, indeed, it seems parents might have more cause to hold their offspring to account than vice versa.

In the week when it was revealed that having children does not significantly increase happiness among retirees, Tory MP David Mowat, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Community Health and Care, made a statement that made some of us gulp.

Talking about care for the elderly, he said: “We have as much responsibility to look after our parents as our children.” Those who heard this while doing the school run, en route to the office, must have wondered how much more will be asked of them. Find a solution for climate change? Bring peace to the Middle East?

A mere half a century ago, Mr Mowat would have been mocked for stating the obvious. Today, his words are almost radical. They go against the grain of recent years in which the requirements of younger generations seem always to trump those on the upper rungs of life’s ladder. Yet, as tales emerge about the manifold deficiencies of health provision for the aged, it would seem we are reaching a turning point in the way society is organised.

Mr Mowat’s statement could become the credo for a dramatically better, more compassionate outlook. We certainly need a spur to create a world where the wellbeing of the elderly is not relegated to the state but, to the best of their abilities, is accepted as a normal and important part of every family’s role.

The recent report about a patient in Dumfries and Galloway who was kept in hospital for 508 days because there was no care home place for her was merely an extreme example of an escalating problem, here and beyond the Border. Despite our much-vaunted system of free care for the elderly, there are many problems with its delivery.

Home visits are vanishingly swift, leaving carers as well as clients dissatisfied. Some of the old, it transpires, have been paying for help they could have received for free, while others do not like to ask, for fear of admitting frailty or family neglect. Much about the system, of course, is praiseworthy. My experience of it with my own parents was of a far from perfect but generally workable basic scaffold of support.

Barring one notable and alarming exception, it gave us all comfort to know there was a daily visitor looking out for their welfare.

But, as became clear from the workloads and timetables of carers in their small seaside town, the demands of free care are bottomless, and the number qualified to fill them inadequate at best. Mr Mowat’s noble declaration might well, of course, have been more fiscal than philosophical, signalling the first salvo in a battle to persuade children to shoulder the burden of cost for their parents’ welfare.

The more pressing and fundamental issue he raises, however, is one that affects everyone, regardless of income; namely, our relationship with the elderly. What do we think we owe them, and what do they feel entitled, let alone willing, to ask for?

Those of us who love our parents, and acknowledge our obligation to them, would never see them as a liability, no matter how needy. Yet how far does our duty to them extend? And, because this bond works both ways, how much involvement or interference do the elderly want from their children?

The days of automatically taking care of the family’s oldest members within your own household, as my parents and their relatives did, are long gone. By the time my husband and I discussed it as a possibility, it was already too late.

Not only would mum and dad not have contemplated moving from their home of 50-plus years while they were fit enough to remain there but also, when they were eventually obliged to consider leaving, they required medical support none of us was competent to provide.

The guilt of knowing that you could have done more never fades, and those torn between the demands of the elderly and clamorous offspring are not to be envied. Yet Mr Mowat is right: the aged have every bit as much right to our care as the young.

We seem to have lost sight of that fact. The pressures of modern living (demanding jobs, high property costs, the expense of educating kids, living at a distance) all conspire to squeeze out time and attention for those who sometimes get very little of it from anyone.

This is not a plea for children to take the elderly into their homes (independent-minded parents would resist that as strongly as they could) and, regardless of the solution families reach, it must be practical and sustainable. Having conversations about the future earlier in a parent’s advancing years, however, might be wise.

If I had thought ahead, I would have suggested my mother and father move close to me or my siblings more urgently and persuasively. Why did I not?

The answer, perhaps, is because finding the balance between helping and interfering, supporting and smothering, is difficult to gauge.

The only thing to bear in mind in this situation is that it is a great deal harder for the old to ask for help than for us to offer it.