According to the reading article attached please answer question 1 in at least 250 words and reply to number 2 in at least 250 words. List any sources used at the end in apa format. Thank you! According to the reading, what are some of the positive and negative consequences that come with aging?2. Some of the patterns and outcomes associated with caregiving in aging families include:Women provide more family care than men. Females provide more hours of care, most likely to provide personal assistance, and as a result experience greater burden and more depression than male caregivers. Siblings often negotiate among themselves who will provide care to an aging parent, which introduces conflict into the family. Spouses are sometimes caregivers and among them wife caregivers tend to suffer greater adverse effects than husband caregivers, such as to the extent to which caregiving restricts outside activities. Research also shows that depressive symptoms following the transition into caregiving was the same for spouse and adult-child caregivers. Another pattern of caregiving in aging families is the caregiving of children by grandparents. Caregiving grandparents face challenges that predate their caregiving abilities. The high demand of grandchild care takes a toll of the physical and mental well-being of custodial grandparents. On the other hand, supplemental care provided by grandparents have been found to have positive effects on intergenerational family relationships. Children who have early care by a grandparent tend to stay in a close relationship with them in adulthood. The children are also more likely to reciprocate by providing care to their grandparents. (Silverstein & Giarusso, 2010)
aging_.pdf
Unformatted Attachment Preview
University of Southern California
MERRIL SILVERSTEIN
ROSEANN GlARRUSSO
California State University, Los Angeles
Aging and Family Life: A Decade Review
In this review, we summarize and critically
evaluate the major empirical, conceptual, and
theoretical directions that studies of aging
families have taken during the first decade
of the 21st century. The field has benefited
from an expanded perspective based on four
overarching themes: (a) complexity in emotional
relations, (b) diversity in family structures and
households, (c) interdependence of family roles
and functions, and (d) patterns and outcomes
of caregiving. Although research on aging
families has advanced theory and applied
innovative statistical techniques, the literature
has fallen short in fully representing diverse
populations and in applying the broadest set of
methodological tools available. We discuss these
and other frontier areas of scholarship in light
of the aging of baby boomers and their families.
In this review, we summarize and critically
evaluate the major empirical, conceptual, and
theoretical directions that social scientific studies
of aging families have taken during the first
decade of the 21st century. Scholarly interest in
aging families has accelerated in recent years,
spurred in part by rapid population aging and
increased global concerns about the vitality of
Davis School of Gerontology, University of Southern
California, 3715 McClintock Ave., Los Angeles, CA
90089-0191 (merrils@usc.edu).
‘Department of Sociology, California State University,
Los Angeles, 5151 State University Dr., Los Angeles,
CA 90032 (rgiarru@calstatela.edu).
Key Words: aging families, caregiving, intergenerational
relations, marriage, siblings, widowhood.
systems of care and support for the aged, as
well as structural and compositional changes in
families first experienced in large numbers by
the baby-boom cohort that now stands on the
threshold of old age.
Improvements in life expectancy have
changed the structure of multigenerational families; joint survivorship within and across generations has resulted in extended periods of support
exchanges (including caregiving) and affective
connections over the life span. At the same time,
relationships in aging families have become
more ñuid and less predictable, as reduced fertility and increased rates of divorce, remarriage,
and stepfamily formation have altered the microcontext in which intergenerational, spousal, and
sibling relationships fijnction. The implications
of increased diversity in kinship structures for
such practical outcomes as support and caregiving to older family members have yet to be
parsed but remain important concerns in light
of declining filial commitment and the aging of
support providers and recipients.
Despite efforts to represent aging families
more holistically, empirical research in this
area still tends to be segmented by relational
type, specifically affiliations between parents
and adult children, grandparents and grandchildren, husbands and wives, and siblings.
Our reading of the literature over the past
decade across relational domains pointed to four
overarching themes that organize our critical
review of established and emerging areas of
scholarship: (a) complexity in emotional relations, (b) diversity in family structures and
households, (c) interdependence of family roles
and functions, and (d) patterns and outcomes in
Journal of Marriage and Family 72 (October 2010): 1039- 1058
DOLlO.l 111/J.1741-3737.2010.00749.X
1039
1040
caregiving. Another overarching characteristic
of research published on aging families in the
past decade is an increased focus on global
concerns, specifically on how family relationships of older adults function differently across
national populations and political regimes. This
international research informs our review and is
integrated throughout the thematic sections.
Although, strictly speaking, all families studied over time are aging, we limit our review to
publications that study families of middle-aged
and older individuals, including relationships
those individuals maintain with younger family members. This review primarily draws on
articles published in two streams of scholarship
using a complementary strategy to maximize the
number of citations in the highest impact journals between 2000 and 2009. Searches were conducted in Family Studies Abstracts and Abstracts
in Social Gerontology using the EBSCO host
search engine (http://web.ebscohost.com/). We
focused on three journals concerned with family
relationships {Journal of Marriage and Family
{JMF^, Family Relations, and Journal of Family Issues, searching the terms aging, aged, and
elderly) and four journals devoted to scholarship
in social and behavioral gerontology {Journal
of Gerontology: Social Sciences, Journal of
Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, Research
on Aging, and Ageing and Society (searching
the terms family, intergenerational, older parents, grandparents, adult children, grandchildren, siblings, spouses, and marriage). When
topics were sparsely represented, we turned to
other social and behavioral science journals as
necessary. Because of space constraints, illustrative publications rather than an exhaustive
list are cited. In selecting research to discuss,
we attempted to strike a balance between representing the main substantive topics found in the
literature and highlighting those topics judged to
be at the frontier of family research.
Emotional Complexity of Relationships
in Aging Families
Over the past 10 years, greater attention has
been devoted to complexity in aging family
relations deriving from conflicting emotions in
intergenerational ties, conflicting reports about
these ties based on generational perspective,
and patterns of change in the perceived quality of marital relations. In this section, we
review conceptualizations of later-life family
Journal of Marriage and Family
relationships and supporting empirical evidence
that have advanced the field by challenging
long-standing assumptions about harmony in
the emotional content of adult intergenerational
relations, agreement in the perception of relationships across generations, and the presence
of a late-life rebound in marital satisfaction.
Solidarity and ambivalence. Conceptualizing
and measuring the multiple complexities of
families in later life has long been a challenge for social and behavioral researchers.
The most prominent conceptualization over the
past several decades has been the intergenerational solidarity paradigm—a comprehensive
scheme for describing sentiments, behaviors,
attitudes, values, and structural arrangements
in parent-adult child relationships (Bengtson,
Biblarz, & Roberts, 2002). However, in the
1990s, it was formally observed that family
members may simultaneously hold both warm
and antagonistic feelings toward each other—an
emotional discordance identified as ambivalence
(Leuscher & Pillemer, 1998). Intergenerational
ambivalence soon became a significant focus
in family research, and in 2002, a featured
section devoted to this topic appeared in JMF.
The ambivalence perspective was portrayed as a
competing theoretical orientation to that of the
intergenerational solidarity paradigm (Connidis
& McMullin, 2002) but was also viewed as complimentary to an enhanced conceptualization of
solidarity that included conflict in its formulation (Bengtson, Giarrusso, Mabry, & Silverstein,
2002). Continuing scholarly integration between
these two approaches has benefitted family
research by diversifying the conceptual toolbox
available to intergenerational researchers who
are studying emotional ties in aging families and
their consequences for well-being (Lowenstein,
2007).
Scholars have used several types of measurement strategies to identify intergenerational
ambivalence: direct strategies that ask respondents to rate the degree to which they have
mixed feelings toward a parent or child (Pillemer
& Suitor, 2002) and indirect strategies that ask
respondents to independently rate the degree of
closeness and conflict with a parent or child.
The latter approach has used additive scales
that describe the intensity of opposing feelings
(Willson, Shuey, Elder, & Wickrama, 2006)
and categorical techniques—often employing
the solidarity model—to identify ambivalent
Aging and Family Life
types of relationships in which affection and
conflict are both strong (Van Gaalen & Dysktra,
2006).
Research aiming to identify specific issues
that induced parental feelings of ambivalence
have suggested reasons related to adult children’s busy schedules, choice of romantic partners, and parenting styles (Peters, Hooker, &
Zvonkovic, 2006), and tensions between norms
of solidarity and parents’ expectations that their
children be more independent (Pillemer et al.,
2007). Adult children were more likely to feel
ambivalent about older parents to whom they
were providing extensive support and who were
in declining health, which suggests that parental
dependence and role-reversal caused mixed feelings in these relationships (Fingerman, Chen,
Hay, Cichy, & Leflfowitz, 2006).
Intergenerational ambivalence as a conceptual tool has found broadened application with
regard to the larger social forces that shape
family life. For instance, institutional pressures
(e.g., the demands of work) that exert competing claims on time and resources of family
members are thought to induce stress—what
is termed structural ambivalence (Connidis &
McMullin, 2002). Another broadened conceptualization known as collective ambivalence has
been defined as the amount of variation in the
quality of intergenerational relationships across
multiple children in the same families (Ward,
2008). The concepts of structural and collective
ambivalence extend the ambivalence paradigm
beyond interpersonal relationships to the more
expansive and complex social contexts within
which these relationships are embedded.
Ambivalence in intergenerational relationships has been found in several investigations to
have negative consequences. Fingerman, Pitzer,
Lefkowitz, Birdett, & Mroczek (2008) found
that having stronger ambivalent feelings about
family members in other generations was associated with worse psychological well-being.
Ward (2008) found that collective ambivalence
had a similar negative association with wellbeing outcomes. A five-nation study of older
parent-child relations that included measures
of intergenerational solidarity or conflict and
ambivalence in its protocols found that lower
affection and greater ambivalence independently
predicted poorer quality of life in the elderly,
though the effects were marginal relative to
the adverse influence of poor health and low
economic resources (Lowenstein, 2007).
1041
Because sibling ties are closer than many
family relationships, they also are subject to feelings of ambivalence (Connidis, 2007). Mixed
feelings toward siblings may stem from perceptions of parental favoritism—current or past.
Retrospective accounts of maternal favoritism
in childhood better predicted sibling tension in
middle age than did current accounts of maternal favoritism (Suitor et al., 2009). Thus, siblings
were more likely to have good relationships with
one another in later life if they felt their mother
treated them equitably in childhood.
Relational perspectives. Complexity has also
been examined in terms of differences in how the
partners involved perceive their mutual relationship. Empirical research from the past 10 years
has made strides in recognizing that incumbent
family members potentially use different subjective criteria to evaluate relationships. Studies
that employ dyadic designs capable of comparing assessments across relational partners
have suggested that relying on reports from a
single informant may produce unique results.
For example, Giarrusso, Feng, and Bengtson
(2004) found that emotional cohesion between
parents and their adult children declined over
three decades when assessed from the point of
view of the younger generation but not from that
of the older generation. Although dyadic reporting discrepancies of this type may be viewed as
evidence of bias, they are also informative about
theoretical propositions. For instance, the generational stake hypothesis posits that parents are
more strongly incentivized to emotionally invest
in their children than children are incentivized
to emotionally invest in their parents.
Reporting discrepancies have also been found
with respect to social support exchanges. Adult
daughters tended to overreport the amount of
support they provided to older mothers when
compared against the amount of support their
mothers claimed to receive (Lin, 2008). Similarly, evidence from The Netherlands showed
that both older parents and their adult children overreported the amount of help given and
underreported the amount of help received, with
greater intergenerational correspondence among
the better educated (Mandemakers & Dykstra,
2008). The tendency to view oneself (relatively)
more as an altruistic provider of support and
less as a dependent receiver may be better interpreted within a cultural or social psychological
framework than purely as a systematic bias.
1042
Marital quality, age, and aging. How emotional
ties between spouses change over the course of
a marriage has long been a topic of inquiry in
family science. Most cross-sectional studies of
marital satisfaction have suggested a U-shaped
curve with satisfaction high during the early and
late stages of marriage and low during the middle stage (Corra, Carter, Carter, & Knox, 2009).
However, research using longitudinal data has
suggested that this pattern is overstated and possibly incorrect. For example, VanLaningham,
Johnson, and Amato (2001), using national data
over a 17-year period, found that marital happiness declined beyond the early years of marriage
but continued to decline or remained flat over
the later years. Other researchers using the same
longitudinal data set, but over a 20-year period,
found more stability than change in trajectories of marital happiness; marital quality slightly
increased in the later years of marriage and only
minimally regained any of its earlier decline
(Dush, Taylor, & Kroeger, 2008). In general,
these longitudinal studies provide a serious challenge to the long-held belief that marital quality
rebounds in old age.
Health and stress appear to play a role in how
marital quality changes over time and into later
life. Husbands and wives who reported a stronger
decline in their spouses’ health experienced
a greater reduction in their perceived marital
quality (Yorgason, Booth, & Johnson, 2009).
Marital quality was found to be more strongly
associated with chronological age than with
marital duration (Umberson, Williams, Powers,
Chen, & Campbell, 2005), which suggests that
researchers tracking marital trends focus more
on life-span changes than on length of marriage.
Umberson, Williams, Powers, Liu, and Needham (2005) found that marital quality declined
precipitously over an 8-year period in response to
stress. In addition, they found that the marriages
of those who experienced low levels of stress in
childhood were less adversely affected by stress
experienced in adulthood. Longitudinal research
on marriages generally supports a modest continuous decline in marital quality with aging, but
it also has suggested that poor health and stress,
as well as coping resources forged earlier in life,
play significant roles in the rate of this decline.
Diversity in Family Structures and Households
In this section, we address the implications of
fundamental changes in family and household
Journal of Marriage and Family
structures over the past few decades for how
elders maintain family relationships and draw on
family support. Chief among these changes are
increased rates of divorce, remarriage, stepfamily formation, cohabitation, and childlessness.
Divorce and stepfamily formation. Complex
family structures resulting from marital disruption and remarriage have variegated family
forms such that lines of responsibilities may
be blurred or uncertain between generations.
A major question addressed in the literature
is whether family disruption and reconstitution
reduce the amount of intergenerational support
available to adults as they age. Research has
revealed detrimental effects of parental divorce
and stepfamily formation on support that adult
children provide to their elderly parents, which
has raised concerns about the support portfolio
of future cohorts of vulnerable elders with historically high rates of divorce and remarriage
(Pezzin, Pollak, & Schone, 2008).
The impact of parental divorce is not equivalent for the intergenerational relationships of
mothers and fathers. A significant gender differential was found with adult children having
lower contact with divorced fathers and higher
contact with divorced mothers when compared
to the amount of contact with their stably married equivalents (Shapiro, 2003). A study of
frail older parents found that, of all the genderby-marital status combinations, divorced fathers
received the lowest level of personal care from
their children (Lin, 2008). Taken together, the
evidence suggests that marital disruption has
made the filial safety net of elderly men more
porous.
However, evidence also suggests that emerging cohorts of elderly parents, including
older fathers, may be less socially disadvantaged than those who came before them.
Research in the United Kingdom has shown
that parental divorce had negligible effects on
intergenerational support and contact in early old
age (Glaser, Tomassini, & Stutchbury, 2008).
The authors conclude that the power of divorce
to weaken intergenerational ties has moderated
because marital disruption is more normative
in contemporary cohorts and therefore more
socially acceptable.
Filial commitment of adult stepchildren to
their aging stepparents has been shown to be
particularly fragile. Research has found that
norms of obligation toward older stepparents
Aging and Family Life
were consistently weaker than they were toward
older biological parents (Coleman, Ganong,
& Rothrauff, 2006). Indeed, research has
demonstrated that many stepchildren do not
define their stepparents as parents or even as
family (Schmeeckle et al., 2006), which suggests
a potentially muted intergenerational response to
elderly stepparents with exigent needs.
Cohabitation. One of the newer changes in the
living arrangements of aging families over the
past several decades is the increase in cohabitation among middle-aged and older adults.
Cohabitation among mature adults has become
increasingly common (Brown, Bulanda, & Lee,
2005), though there are substantial differences
across nations. For example, cohabiting unions
are twice as prevalent among older adults in
Finland as in the United States (Moustgaard
& Martikainen, 2009). Further, new forms of
cohabitation have emerged in northern and westem Europe, whereby partners maintain separate
households and finances while living together
intermittently, a phenomenon known as living together apart (De Jong Gierveld, 2004).
Although it remains to be seen whether this
more unusual type of partnership will diffuse to
the mature population of the United States, it
is clear that cohabitation will increase in older
age groups as younger cohorts with more liberal
attitudes toward relationships ultimately age into
their later years.
Concerns over cohabitation among the aged
center on whether being in a nonmarital union
adversely affects the social, psychological, and
physical well-being of the cohabitants. Research
in the United States has found that middle-aged
and elderly cohabitors have lower psychological
well-being and poorer quality partner relationships than their married counterparts (Brown,
Bulanda et al., 2005). Hansen, Moum, and
Shapiro (2007) questioned whether this latter
finding …
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
Recent Comments