Legal regulation problemsof children's obligations to maintain their parents: case of Lithuania

ENThe relevance of this study. Relevance of the topic. Children's support for parents is understood as the performance of their duties by providing parents with the support for their needs.This duty of children is a personal obligation that cannot be transferred to other persons and means that children must maintain supportfor their parents themselves. The right of parents to maintenance in Lithuanian law is linked to two mandatory conditions: 1) the parents are incapacitated for work due to disability, retirement age or illness (or other reasons); 2) the income or property received by the parents is not sufficient for subsistence, therefore they need maintenance.The main problem.The obligation of children to maintain the parents in need of their support is absolute, if it is established that the income received by the parents or their property is not sufficient to live and the parents have taken proper care of their children in the past and avoided improper performance of their duties.The aim of thisstudyto analyze the legal problems related with the obligation of children to maintain their parents. The following taskswere set for the defined goal: to reveal the concept of children's duty to maintain their support for parents; to examine the essential aspects of the legal regulation of the duty of children to maintain the necessary support for their parents; to analyze the problems of legal regulation of the duty of children to maintain the parents necessary for their support in court practice.The paper concludedEstablishing parental responsibility for children before death runs counter to the principles of equality, justice, proportionality and reasonableness, as the burden imposed is not equivalent to parental responsibility for children before adulthood.The responsible authorities do not take the initiative to protect the rights of obsolete parents.The novelty the law does not establish criteria for who should provide maintenance in order of priority -a spouse or an adult child.Neither the Constitution nor the Civil Code clarifies the concepts of guardianship and care.The criterion of incapacity for work established by law limits parents' access to maintenance. As the result to enable parents in need of maintenance who have not received maintenance from their adult children for more than a month to obtain maintenance from a public authority, which could subsequently recover the amounts paid from the adult children for whom maintenance has been imposed. Theused methodology is scientific literature analysis, analytical, comparative and descriptive methods. Keywords: parents and their children, child's duties to support their parents, support, family law. [From the publication]