"filial affection" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is most often used to refer to the strong feelings of love and devotion between a child and their parent. For example, "John was touched by the filial affection his daughter showed him when she hugged him goodbye."
Giovanni Gabrieli studied with his uncle, Andrea Gabrieli, whom he regarded with almost filial affection.
He watched them engage in a series of ambiguously violent gestures — squeeze, swat, bite, slap — which, to his eyes, indicated maternal and filial affection.
His account of the music hall is tinged with deep filial affection for the lives of performers and the conditions in which they worked.
There are numerous poems of filial affection, for both mother and father, and wonderful poems for his children and, latterly, his granddaughter.
Of all the losses that Miller contrives to heap on Willy — salary, job, dignity, filial affection — the most heartbreaking is the loss of the ideal of himself as a good father.
The arrival of the poor country bumpkin in the big city and the testing of filial affection against the cruelty of the industrializing economy have been myths of the modern age at least since Dickens.
Declaring that conscience was the most important difference between man and the lower animals, he speculated that "any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man" (Ibid. 98).
Darwin suggested that "any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or as nearly as well developed, as in man".
I wanted the play to include that: the whole crisscross of parental love, filial love, with affection and guilt on both sides.
It struck me forcibly that that's an unusual event to see in one's life, to see in a man a filial attraction and affection for another he had formerly been the captor of.
Only when parents' love is given to children as deeply as possible, can deep affection form and filial piety to parents will arise voluntarily from children.
