three - Older parents and their adult children

Summary

Introduction

There has been a tendency in the UK, North America and indeed Western Europe for politicians, policy makers, researchers and, equally important, the public to view the relationship between ageing parents and their adult children in a very narrow way as one that is dominated by care-giving and/or care receiving. Whilst recognising the vital importance of the welfare role undertaken within families, Matthews (2002: 211) warns that one consequence of the ‘… myopia of focusing entirely on family caregivers’ has been to produce a gloomy picture of older families. More recently in the UK, a popular Saturday newspaper published a two-page feature (Hilpern, 2008), ‘Who's going to take care of Mum?’, that explored the ‘plight’ of older adults who were left to care for their ageing parents. Furthermore, the theorising of intergenerational relationships discussed in Chapter One, specifically those perspectives that relate to relationships between adult child and older parent such as solidarity, reciprocity, conflict and ambivalence, have been so extensively employed within studies on relationships of welfare (see for example, the cross-national OASIS study) that it would be all too easy to forget their relevance and usefulness for all aspects of intergenerational family life.

Indeed, as Connidis (2001: 158) reminds us, most older people maintain relatively independent lifestyles for most, if not all, of their lives, and most of those older people are enmeshed in a diversity of family relationships not just those relating to ‘welfare’. Although a minority of older people are ‘childless’, that is either have never had children or have experienced the death of a child during their lifecourse, most older people in the UK are parents and many of them have adult children who themselves are approaching what might be termed pensionable age (ONS, 2001). Changes in demographic trends over the last 50 years, brought about by improvement in and access to public health measures, decreased mortality and fertility (Phillipson, 1998), have resulted in a dramatic lengthening of the time that older people and their adult children are ageing together.

A significant consequence of this is that both generations can expect to go through together many life transitions and milestones not experienced by previous cohorts (Lowenstein, 2007), or what Hagestad and Herlofsen (2007) refer to as ‘joint survival, durable ties’.