Parental Ambivalence Toward Adult Children of Later-Life Families in the Presence of an Adult Child with Disabilities

Background and Purpose: Previous studies have shown that the relationship an adult child has with his/her aging parents or brothers and sisters is affected when the adult child has a disability or serious health problem.  A life course and family systems perspectives suggest that when a family member has a serious health problem, the relationships of other family members to one another are likely affected. Little is known, however, about the ways in which the presence of adult children with disabilities affects the relationship between the non-disabled sibling and his/her aging parents. In this study, we examined whether aging parents were likely to report poorer quality of relationship with their non-disabled adult children in the families of an adult child with developmental disabilities (DD) or serious mental illnesses (SMI) compared with families without any disabled children. We also examined whether parents of adults with the conditions were more likely than parents from the comparison group to report greater variability in the quality of their relationships with their non-disabled adult children.

Methods: We used data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a community-based random sample of Wisconsin high school graduates in 1957 and their selected siblings. Our final sample included 6,792 aging parents (M_age=71) regarding 22,225 of their non-disabled adult children (M_age=44). To measure the relationship quality, we calculated ambivalence scores, indicating simultaneous and contradictory feelings of parents (i.e., solidarity and conflict) toward adult children. We estimated multi-level models to examine between- and within- family differences in feelings of ambivalence in the parent-adult child relationship: we tested (1) whether parents from families of adults with DD or SMI were more likely to report feelings of ambivalence toward their non-disabled children than those from families where none of children have a disability (i.e., between-family differences) and (2) whether or not parents of adults with the conditions were likely to report greater variability in the quality of their relationships with adult children (i.e., within-family variability).

Results: Parents of a child with SMI reported greater ambivalence in their relationships with their other adult children. However, levels of ambivalence in families of adults with DD did not differ from those in the comparison group.  Compared with parents who did not have a disabled child, parents of a child with SMI reported higher levels of conflict with their other adult children whereas they did not differ with respect to feelings of solidarity. In addition, parents who had an adult child with SMI were more likely to report greater variability in the quality of the relationships with their children than the comparison group parents.

Conclusions and Implications: These findings suggest that siblings of the adult child with SMI were adversely affected by their brother or sister with the conditions in terms of the relationships with their parents. Attention to the needs and family interactions of siblings, as well as parents, can thus create a more holistic approach to intervention with these families and enhance their ability to provide support to their sibling with serious mental illnesses.