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http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/divorce-foretells-childs-future-care-elderly-parent-14289.html

Science Blog

Submitted by BJS on Sat, 2007-09-22 09:13. Topic: brain and behavior

Divorce foretells child's future care for elderly parent

For better or worse, baby boomers approach retirement with more
complex marital histories than previous generations. Temple University
researcher Adam Davey, Ph.D. has found the impact of these events -
divorces, widowhood, and remarriage - can predict if a child will
provide more involved care in the future.

A divorce may have happened over 30 years ago, but the changes it
caused can have a long lasting effect for the child into adulthood,
Davey said. The findings appear in the September issue of Advances in
Life Course Research.

More specifically, divorce predicted an adult child would be less of
involved with day-to-day assistance later in life for the aging
parent. These activities include the child helping the parent maintain
chores in the home.

"It's not the divorce itself that affects the quality of the
parent-child relationship, but it's what happens afterwards such as
geographical separation," said Davey, a gerontologist who studies
trends in the baby boomer generation and other aging issues.

Davey analyzed data from 2,087 parents, aged 50 and older, who
reported on their 7,019 adult children in the National Survey of
Family and Households. Information was collected between 1987 and
1994.

"Marital transitions affect families in a number of ways," Davey said.
"They can interrupt the relationship of support between a parent and
child, and the evidence suggests that the continuity of support by
parents and to parents matters."

The study also found marital disruptions earlier in a child's life can
be less detrimental to the relationship than those, which occurred in
adulthood. This also means children in the same family can be affected
differently by the same event, Davey said.

The results suggest that both the type of transition and when in a
child's life it occurs are important. A father's remarriage early in a
child's life makes it more likely that the child will provide help
later in life, but the same transition when the child is an adult
reduces the chances of a child helping the father.

There is also evidence that the more a child's life was spent with a
divorced mother, the higher the chances that child will provide
assistance when the mother is older, Davey said.

One surprising finding was that both mothers and fathers are only half
as likely to get support from a non-biological child. This has
important implications for those who reach old age anticipating help
from step-children.

"Society does not yet have a clear set of expectations for
step-children'

s responsibility," Davey said.

Despite the findings, this does not mean these potential effects
damage the parent-child relationship as a whole, Davey said.

While marital transitions don't seem to cause irreparable damage to
the support that children provide to parents in later life, they do
disrupt the needs and resources of both generations. Each child in the
family can experience the same event differently in ways that can
still be seen when the parents reach old age, he said.

"Given how common marital transitions have become, and how complex
families have become as a result, it's surprising that the effects
aren't even more pronounced." Davey added.