Content area
Full Text
In intergenerational relationships, a paradox.
We used to be closer." "He's too busy to spend as much time with me as I wish: "We talk a lot, but never about our personal problems." Such statements might seem to come from people who experience little intimacy in the relationships they describe. Yet, these parents and offspring actually share a deep and rich sense of understanding. Throughout adulthood, members of different generations separate and establish stronger boundaries, and, still, their relationships grow closer. Intergenerational ties introduce the paradox of a distant intimacy.
Parents and adult offspring report strong ties (Antonucci and Akiyama, 1987). Yet, this closeness involves psychological distance. For example, as offspring pass through early and middle adulthood, their relationships with their parents tend to improve (Hagestad, 1987; Umberson, 1992), and during this same period, parents and children also report an increasing sense of the other party as a unique individual with flaws, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities (Blenkner,1963; Labouvie-Vief et al.,1995; Birditt et al., 2000). Although in other relationships, recognition of the other party as an individual might lead to greater self-disclosure and mutuality, the sense of one's parent or child as an individual adult like oneself leads to a decrease in these typical markers of intimacy. Rather, in strong intergenerational ties, each party realizes that the other party has different needs and limitations requiring a new degree of distance. Parents cease to try to direct their children's affairs, and children seek to protect their parents from worry. In this case, distance improves the relationship and can be said to serve as a bridge to a different kind of intimacy.
As adults age, their relationships with individuals from other generations become increasingly important. Many elderly adults are widowed, divorced, or single; some 40 percent of men and 80 percent of women over age 75 have no spouse (Administration on Aging, 2000). For these older adults, a grown child may be the primary social contact (Fingerman,1996). Intimacy in this tie shapes the older adults sense of social embeddedness and enhances well-being.
This paper addresses the complexities of intimacy between parents and children in late life, including reasons that the parent-child tie is an important repository for intimacy, the characteristics of intimacy between parents and children in late...