By Steve Syre
An ongoing study, led by LTSS Center Fellow Kathrin Boerner, focuses on retirement-age adults with living parents.
The relationship between a parent and a child is often complicated. That simple fact of family life doesn’t appear to change in old age.
An ongoing study of older adults with living parents who are very old is examining those relationships and how parent-child dynamics work late in life. Kathrin Boerner, a fellow at the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston, is leading a team of researchers who are interviewing adult children age 65 and older along with their parents who are at least 90 years old.
“Older children and very old parents are not so unusual anymore,” said Boerner, an associate professor of gerontology at UMass Boston’s McCormack Graduate School. “And virtually nothing is known about the relationships of very old adults and their ‘old’ children.”
Researchers have interviewed about 70 pairs of adult children and parents so far. They expect to speak with 120 parent-child couples by the end of the year. The original scope of the study, supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), has been expanded to include 100 older children who have a parent living with dementia.
SUPPORT WORKS BOTH WAYS
Boerner said early results from the study interviews showed expected levels of support from adult children for their parents. But she was surprised by the degree to which interviewed parents still helped their adult children.
“Very old parents provide more support to their senior children than I had expected,” she said. “While it is more in the domain of emotional support and advice, they also supply some practical support.”
THE PAST REMAINS A BIG INFLUENCE
Interviews with old parents and adult children also illustrated how events and relations in the distant past influence how both feel about each other now. That’s especially true for the adult children.
The study’s researchers describe those past experiences as “old benefits” or “old wounds.” Positive histories certainly help. But researchers were surprised by the enduring influence of negative experiences that took place long ago.
“They are still relevant,” said Boerner about those experiences. “You would think some things just go away or are not important anymore. Old feelings and resentments make it much harder to help the parent and do the caregiving job.”
THE LONGEVITY CHALLENGE
Some adult children interviewed for the study expressed frustration about the demands of helping a very old parent. Boerner said researchers were surprised by the degree of raw honesty adult children expressed to them about a difficult issue.
“There was this sense among senior children of a violation of the expectation about where they would be at this point in life,” said Boerner. “They thought there would be a time in their life when they could do things for themselves, it would not be all about caring for somebody else.”
Those feelings were compounded by social influences, such as friends telling them they were lucky to still have their mothers, said Boerner.
“They don’t feel like they can say in that moment, ‘Yeah, but…’” she says. “It almost makes the situation worse because you can’t talk to anybody about it.”
EXPANDED STUDY SCOPE: THE INFLUENCE OF DEMENTIA
The study’s original design was based on interviews with both parents and adult children. But researchers found they had to turn away a significant number of volunteering adult children whose parents are living with dementia and could not be interviewed.
Researchers concluded that they were missing an important part of story and obtained additional NIA funding to add 100 adult children whose very old parents are living with dementia. About 30 of those interviews have taken place so far. Though the responses are often consistent with those from other adult children, many of those children describe their parent relationship differently.
“They sometimes say, ‘I don’t have a relationship anymore,’” said Boerner. “It’s more along the lines of ‘how do I have a relationship when the person isn’t really there anymore, as the person he or she was before.’”
The study’s data-collection process is expected to be completed by the end of the year. Researchers plan to finish their data analysis and begin to disseminate final results in a series of articles later in 2020.