Linked Lives: Intergenerational Relationships and Wellbeing

With increasing life expectancy, adult children and older parents have the opportunity of staying involved in each other’s lives longer. Research on how lives are linked across generations is growing. This session focuses on how adult children’s marriage formation may affect older parents’ wellbeing. Adult children’s changing intimate relationships are not merely choices between two individuals. Particularly in societies where norms of universal marriage or assortative mating on characteristics such as age, education, and family origin persist, older parents expect their adult children to marry a suitable partner. When adult children do not follow the norms of marriage formation, older parents may feel stressful and self-blaming for their children’s deviation from social expectations and hold ambivalent feelings towards the adult children. For example, due to the rising economic inequality, getting married to a spouse with similar or better socioeconomic backgrounds reflected in education and family origins becomes increasingly important to sustain quality of life and achieve upward social mobility. In societies where parents used to heavily interfere with the adult children’s marital decisions, they may suffer socially and psychologically when their children’s marriages do not conform to the convention of assortative mating. The negative influences may be cushioned by parents’ socioeconomic status, intergenerational exchanges, and their relationship quality with the adult children. We invite empirical research papers on the relationships between adult children’s marital decisions including timing, form, assortative mating and their parents’ wellbeing both objectively and subjectively. We welcome studies from different sociocultural contexts with cross-national/ cross-time comparative perspectives.