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Unfortunately the childless complain if you tell them that they can't retire from their job, and without the money coming in from their job they can't keep doing what they've been doing for the past 70 years of thier life. There is also a period of time where people are perfectly capable of living a decent life in good shape but they wouldn't be able to work their full time jobs any more. This leads to them making less money that needs to be made up from somewhere, and that somewhere in western countries is by and large the state for most people becuase they don't have a proper culture of filial responsibility or didn't have children or even worse (this one boggles me), despite fully knowing they won't have anyone to take care of them in their old age, made absolutely zero efforts to save up extra money to build a buffer to live off of when they are retired.
And when you were a little child, you too were a burden, nothing more than a little shit machine, yet your parents elected to take it on instead of handing you over to CPS so the government could take it instead. In their old age it is now time for you to take care of them, doesn't have to be physically if you can't handle it (like advanced dementia, I wouldn't wish caring for a parent with that onto anyone), you can make monetary contributions to their care too (even in my homeland we do have specialised homes for the small fraction of people who become so senile they need a minder all day instead of dying earlier of the far bigger killers of heart disease and cancer).
Only a small proportion (rising, but still small) of people make it to that age where dementia makes taking care of them a huge burden on their children and our specialist care homes can handle it in the cases where things get to that point (of course how much you are willing to pay influences how good this specialist care home gets, from the most basic fully paid for government shit that probably takes a few years off your already dwindling future life expectancy up to and including having your own private trained servants take care of you in your own home, a distant relative of mine over 90 is getting this treatment right now). However in the large majority of other cases your children can easily take care of your needs at home until you're within a few months of death, at which point most of your costs are to do with the medical system rather than the social care system anyways.
Or they handed you over to the kindergarten and then elementary school + after-school, which is basically the equivalent to the elderly being handed over to retirement homes. And this has been the social norm for many decades.
This is another weird thing about the western schooling system. Back home school ends at around 1pm for elementary+middle years and around 3pm for secondary school. After school activities exist but are rare and only take place a few days a week.
Regardless, even this this handing over of children is only for a few hours each day, in the end the children still live with their parents and spend more time with their parents than anyone else. That's absolutely not true for retirement homes, indeed I wouldn't call a situation where an elderly person was spending more time daily in the care of their children than with professionals to be anything like them being placed in a retirement home.
Placing you in a retirement home is more akin to handing you over to CPS with your parents giving you a visit for a few hours every other week.
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