Intergenerational Coresidence and Contact: A Longitudinal Analysis of Adult Children's Response to Their Mother's Widowhood

Abstract

In this article, we are interested in seeing how a father's death affects adult children's relationships with their mothers. We also examine whether our understanding of change in intergenerational relationships over the life course is improved by the use of panel data. For this purpose we use the first and second interviews of the National Survey of Families and Households. Our results and those of previous analyses that use cross-sectional data find little relationship between a mother's widowhood and increased intergenerational social support. However, in the longitudinal analysis, we find that widowhood affects contact between mothers and their adult children. This indicates that cross-sectional analyses can produce misleading results. R. KELLY RALEY University of North Carolina* The death of a father is a traumatic event for a family and is likely to affect relationships among Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, 1225 South University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 (croan@umich.edu). *Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina, 123 West Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516. Key Words: contact, coresidence, intergenerational relations, proximity, widowhood. the surviving members. The tasks involved with dying, the emotional trauma surrounding the death, and the adjustment to life afterwards increases family members' immediate needs for emotional support and closeness, especially the surviving spouse (Bankoff, 1983). Furthermore, because a mother's widowhood might change her and her children's expectations of one another, the father's death may have long-term effects on mother-child relationships. Because parents often turn to their adult children in times of crises (Eggebeen, 1992; O'Bryant & Morgan, 1990) and because adult children receive comfort from their widowed mothers (Gallagher & Gerstel, 1993), we expect that a father's death will strengthen the mother-child relationship. Interpersonal contact, ranging from coresidence to phone calls, is one of the primary aspects of the relationship that is likely to change. Although most previous research concludes that the salience of intergenerational relationships is determined more from children's needs than from parents' (Crimmins & Ingegneri, 1990; Ward, Logan, & Spitze, 1992), the death of a father might mark a turning point where children respond to their mother's increased need for social support. In fact, previous work has shown that widowed parents give less to their children than married parents do (Cooney & Uhlenberg, 1992; Eggebeen, 1992) and that children give more support to widowed parents than to married parents (Eggebeen, 1992). In this article, we examine both the effects of the mother's widowhood on intergenerational relations and whether cross-sectional data, which measure differences by current marital status, give the same results as longitudinal data, which measure actual changes in marital status. We study three aspects of mother-child relationships: coresidence, proximity, and frequency of contact. Two types of contact are examined: face-to-face visits and communication by telephone and letter. To replicate previous work using cross-sectional data, we compare the relationships of children and currently widowed mothers with those between children and currently married mothers. Finally, we compare mother-child relationships across time, before and after the father's death, to see if the cross-sectional results are misleading. CORESIDENCE, PROXIMITY, CONTACT AND WIDOWHOOD A variety of previous studies has examined whether coresidence, proximity, and frequency of contact differ by marital status. Collectively this research indicates that, although widowed parents are significantly more likely than other parents to live with an adult child, widowhood appears not to affect the amount of contact between mothers and their nonresident adult children. …