Factors That Predispose Middle-Aged Sons and Daughters to Provide Social Support to Older Parents

Abstract

What accounts for the willingness of adult children to serve the needs of their aging parents? Despite social changes-such as geographic mobility, divorce, and women's participation in the labor force -- that have presumably weakened intergenerational family cohesion, adult children, especially daughters, remain the most prodigious and reliable sources of instrumental social support to their parents (Eggebeen & Hogan, 1990; Lawton, Silverstein, & Bengtson, 1994b; Litwak, 1985) In this analysis we examine the reasons behind such support, and ask whether middle-aged sons and daughters are motivated by similar factors. Longitudinal data collected over three time periods are used to examine gender differences in the degree to which earlier expressions of intergenerational family solidarity and attitudes toward family life influence the propensity of children to provide social support to their elderly parents. II BACKGROUND The life course trajectory of family relationships is increasingly recognized by scholars as an important dimension in studying contemporary family relationships (Bengtson & Allen, 1993). Intergenerational relationships in the older family have been viewed as the culmination of a lifelong pattern of family experiences and exchange. Study of the role of earlier experiences and attitudes in contemporary family relations has generally relied on the retrospective reports of children (Anderson & Stevens, 1993; Simos, 1970; Whitbeck, Simons, & Conger, 1991). For example, Rossi and Rossi (1990) provided evidence that the quality of early family relationships as remembered by adult children influences current feelings of affection and normative obligations toward parents. Whitbeck, Simons, and Conger (1991) found that recollected parental rejection indirectly suppresses the volume of social support provided to parents by diminishing the quality of the contemporary parent-child relationship. While these studies have yielded some promising insights into the life course of the family, longitudinal data is needed to prospectively link earlier expressed values, attitudes, and sentiments in the family with later outcomes, and thus establish causal relationships among the constructs. Research on the family provision of social support to older relatives has a long and rich tradition in social gerontology (e.g., see Shanas, 1979). More recently, there has been a growth in the number of studies that focus exclusively on intergenerational family relationships as sources of support for the elderly. These studies have been made possible by the recent availability of detailed, multigenerational, and sometimes longitudinal data concerning family relations collected in national surveys (Hogan, Eggebeen, & Clogg, 1993; Lawton, Silverstein, & Bengtson, 1994b), in regional surveys (Bengtson Roberts, 1991; Rossi & Rossi, 1990; Spitze & Logan, 1990), and in surveys of ethnically diverse samples of African Americans (Chatters & Taylor, 1993) and Mexican Americans (Markides, Boldt, & Ray, 1986). Such research seeks to better understand the conditions under which social transfers are made between adult generations. In this article we use the construct of social solidarity to characterize the relationships between adult children and their parents. The paradigm of solidarity is widely used to specify variables in empirical studies of family relationships (Atkinson, Kivett, & Campbell, 1986; Bengtson & Roberts, 1991; Roberts & Bengtson, 1990; Rossi & Rossi 1990). We focus on four of the six identified components, or dimensions, of solidarity: functional solidarity, affectual solidarity, normative solidarity, and associational solidarity. While previous research suggests that affectual, normative, and associational forms of solidarity predispose children to provide social support to older parents, studies have rarely taken them into account simultaneously when explaining functional solidarity between generations (see Lee, Netzer, & Coward, 1994). …