Using the developmental perspective, a psychologist might look at whether the loss of a parent

Guiding theoretical paradigms have a considerable impact on which issues and factors are given scholarly attention and which are not. In American family studies, the dominance of Talcott Parsons’s (1943) theory of kinship in modern societies, which was part of his overall structural-functionalist model, may have contributed to the relative scarcity of attention to parental loss and its impact on adults. Parsons posited that at the time of marriage, it is most functional for adults in modern societies to largely disconnect from their parents and to focus on their own relatively autonomous nuclear households (Parsons, 1943). Parsons’s theory about adult autonomy from parents also was congruent with the dominant developmental theory of his period— Freudianism—which also emphasized the importance of autonomy from parents for healthy adults (Freud, 1920/1965). However, contrary to supporting what Parsonsian theory might predict, research in the United States during the past 40 years has refuted the idea that Americans radically disconnect from or abandon their parents, married or not (Bengtson, Rosenthal, & Burton, 1990; Cooney & Uhlenberg, 1992; Eggebeen & Hogan, 1990; Rossi & Rossi, 1990; Shanas et al., 1968; Spitz & Logan, 1992).

Although coresidence with older parents is not very prevalent at any point in time in the United States, research guided by a life course approach to intergenerational relationships has demonstrated that significant contact and exchange with living parents continues for the vast majority of American adults throughout adulthood (Rossi & Rossi, 1990). As families become more vertical (i.e., more typically comprising persons from three or more generations) and less horizontal (i.e., more typically comprising fewer persons from the same generation, such as siblings and cousins) in structure, continuing relations across generations and interdependency across generations is becoming even more common and important to adults (Bengtson, 2001; Bengtson et al., 1990; Cooney & Uhlenberg, 1992; Eggebeen & Hogan, 1990; Rossi & Rossi, 1990), and relationship quality with adult parents continues to influence the well-being of adult children (Amato & Afifi, 2006; Barnett, Kibria, Baruch, & Pleck, 1991; Barnett, Marshall, & Pleck, 1992; Umberson, 1992).

Mothers continue to provide a range of financial, emotional, and instrumental support to daughters and sons across the adult years (Cooney & Uhlenberg, 1992; Eggebeen & Hogan, 1990; Rossi & Rossi, 1990). Beginning in early adulthood, there is also a considerable amount of reciprocity in the relationship—especially in emotional and instrumental support. It is only after mothers become relatively older—typically in their 60s or 70s—that adult children are more likely to provide more support to mothers than they continue to receive (Rossi & Rossi, 1990). Thus, mothers often remain a critical social resource to daughters and sons through early adulthood and into middle age.

Fathers, too, have an important influence on women’s and men’s lives and through their multifaceted roles as care providers, companions, spouses to mothers, protectors, models, moral guides, teachers, and breadwinners in families (Lamb, 1997b). Although there is controversy regarding whether biology predisposes women to be more optimally equipped for nurturant parenting than men (Rossi, 1984), considerable research has suggested there is nothing about the biological makeup of fathers that prevents them from becoming a critical secondary (or even primary) attachment figure for infants (Lamb, 1997a). Research has confirmed that most infants do become attached to their fathers (Lamb, 1997a).

In recent years, the literature on caregiving for older parents has suggested that concepts from attachment theory may continue to be relevant for adults in relationship to their aging parents. Bowlby’s (1969, 1973, 1979, 1980) theory of lifespan attachment emphasizes humans’ intrinsic biosocial propensity to seek security through connection with others in the face of a challenging outside world environment. Attachment theory posits that in the early months of life, infants seek a feeling of security (which is also the basis for courage to explore the world) through a responsive, dependable affectional bond that is established with one primary person—the “primary attachment figure,” who in most cultures has been the mother. Because of the importance of the attachment figure to the child, there is a considerable motivation by the child to “protect” the attachment figure.

Empirical work guided by attachment theory has confirmed that mothers tend to be the primary attachment figure for children but that, as noted previously, significant attachments have been found to also develop with fathers (Lamb, 1997a). Furthermore, considerable empirical research has now confirmed that different mental models regarding attachment exist in adults as well as children (Feeney & Noller, 1990; Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Simpson, 1990) and that these attachment models are associated with retrospective accounts of childhood relationships with mothers and fathers (Hazan & Shaver, 1987).

Cicirreli (1983, 1991, 1993) has suggested that continued adult attachment may help to motivate care giving for parents—as adult daughters and sons seek to protect their primary attachment figures, in part, to help them maintain the sense of emotional security that comes from having attachment figures alive and available for support. Attachment theory might also lead us to hypothesize that continued adult attachment to parents would also lead to a decline in well-being on loss of a parent to death in adulthood. Adults who have two parents alive, and therefore who have two primary affectional/attachment bond figures alive in their lives, might be expected to have a well-being advantage in adulthood that has been previously underestimated.

A family life course perspective (Bengtson & Allen, 1993) guides us to consider the importance of “linked lives” for influencing well-being across the life course (Elder, 1998; Elder, Johnson, & Crosnoe, 2003). It also guides us to pay attention to important life transitions and the quality of lifelong histories with relational partners when considering the well-being impact of a life transition (George, 1993).

Attachment bonds with mothers and fathers typically date from birth. Yet all intergenerational dyad bonds are not the same. Gender theorists like Chodorow (1978) have suggested that children are socialized from an early age to identify with their same-gender parent and thereby create somewhat more distance from the opposite-gender parent. We find this theoretical orientation validated by the empirical evidence that the mother-daughter intergenerational bond is characterized by the greatest closeness of all gender dyad generational bonds (Fingerman, 2001; Hagestad, 1987; Rossi & Rossi, 1990) and that fathers and sons show evidence of complex relationships that involve more “sharing of a life world” than fathers and daughters do (Nydegger & Mitteness, 1996). Mother-daughter patterns of closeness intensify with aging, as mothers and daughters assume together more of the responsibility for “kinkeeping”—that is, working to maintain and nurture ties to the generations below and above them (Fingerman, 2001) as well as ties with horizontal kin members (e.g., spouse, siblings, cousins, brothers- and sisters-in-law).

Part of the responsibility for family ties includes the responsibility for caregiving for family members who are not able to take full care of themselves. Increasingly, contemporary older adults are not dying suddenly from acute illnesses (e.g., infections) but are instead experiencing longer periods of chronic disease and chronic disease management with functional limitations prior to death (Pol & Thomas, 1992). This phenomenon has led to an increasing need for caregiving for older parents among contemporary cohorts of young and midlife adults. The 2003 Caregiving in the U.S. Study (2004) found that 21% of a national sample of adults indicated they were providing some degree of help to a person more than 18 years of age who had some functional limitation; more than one third of caregivers in this study noted providing caregiving support to a parent (28% to a mother, 8% to a father).

Overall, women tend to assume a caregiving role for a parent more than men (Caregiving in the U.S., 2004; Marks, 1996a; Stone, Cafferata, & Sangl, 1987), and women doing family caregiving tend to report greater problematic effects in this role (Yee & Schulz, 2000). Research suggests these gendered effects are likely due to the fact that caregiving women tend to be exposed to greater caregiving demands (e.g., spending more lime on caregiving, helping with more intense day-to-day tasks and personal care), they are more likely to be the primary caregiver and experience more role stains in combining the caregiver role with other roles, they receive less informal assistance in care giving from others, and they are less likely to engage in preventive health behaviors than comparable caregiving men (Yee & Schulz, 2000). There does seem some same-gender preference in caregiving (Lee, Dwyer, & Coward, 1993), such that if a father needs care, a son may be enlisted in caregiving. We might expect that many adult children who lose a parent to death have participated in some challenging caregiving close to the time of death, and this factor, too, may contribute to the negative effects on mental and physical health that we might expect derive from the loss of a parent to death.

The life course perspective also emphasizes the importance of “generational time” as a factor in development and well-being (Bengtson & Allen, 1993). Generational time refers to one’s lineage placement and how this connects with responsibilities, entitlements, developmental challenges, and developmental constraints. In the case of parent death, a major transition in generational placement occurs: An adult child often must transition to becoming the standard bearer for the family as the “oldest” generation in the family, and with the assumption of this new generational role comes additional responsibilities to family members that might previously have accrued to the parental generation (Petersen & Rafuls, 1998). We might expect that the experience of generational transition may be most acute when a same-gender parent dies.

There is some related additional evidence suggesting that adult children experience a sense of their own aging and potential challenges of aging in watching their parents’ changing health. Rakowski, Barber, and Seelbach (1983) found that young adult respondents who rated the health of their parents more poorly were also found to report greater anxiety about their own aging and less positive views of friends’ and peers’ aging. In a related vein, Barrett (2003) found that adults who rated their parents’ health more poorly reported older subjective age identities than adults who rated their parents’ health more favorably. Therefore, we might also expect that watching a parent or parents die might also affect adults’ well-being through its impact on increasing concerns about their own aging and health. This impact might be especially acute in the case of a same-gender parent, where identification is strongest. Moving into the role of generational leadership for the family (along with the loss of former support and leadership this also implies) may also be accompanied by increased concern and stress and lead to problematic effects on well-being for individuals losing a parent (or parents) to death.

Psychological well-being has increasingly been conceptualized and operationalized as a multidimensional construct, including both hedonic components and eudaimonic components (Keyes, Shmotkin, & Ryff, 2002; Ryan & Deci, 2001). Hedonic approaches to conceptualizing well-being emphasize well-being to be a state in which individuals experience maximum amounts of pleasure and minimal levels of pain (Kahneman, Diener, & Schwarz, 1999), whereas eudaimonic approaches conceptualize well-being, as live actualization of human potentials and optimal psychosocial functioning and engagement with life (Waterman, 1993).

Assessments of negative affect (e.g., psychological distress) and positive affect (e.g., global happiness) are the most common operationalizations of hedonic well-being. Assessments of self-evaluation (e.g., self-esteem, personal mastery) and other adult development theory-derived outcomes articulated by Ryff (1989; e.g., personal growth, purpose in life, environmental mastery, autonomy, positive relations with others, self-acceptance) are the most typically considered eudaimonic outcomes examined.

Although alcohol abuse has not been typically included in psychologists’ psychometric evaluations and conceptualizations of dimensions of psychological well-being, there has been increased use of measures of alcohol use as an alternative “functional equivalent” measure of psychological distress, with the rationale that this measure may better measure psychological distress for men than typical inventories of depression symptoms (e.g., Simon, 2002; Umberson & Chen, 1994).

Similar to psychological well-being, physical health status has been found to be usefully considered as a multidimensional construct, including related yet distinct dimensions of health perceptions, functional status, symptoms and diseases, mortality, and opportunities for activity (Patrick & Bergner, 1990; Patrick & Erikson, 1993). Health perceptions (most typically measured by a single item for self-assessed health) have been found to be a particularly robust and important dimension of physical health. Across numerous studies and countries, self-assessed health has been found to be an important predictor of mortality, even above and beyond physician’s reports of health (Idler & Benyamini, 1997).

In this study, given the relative scarcity of research on the impact of parental death on adult children, we took an expansive approach to examining well-being outcomes. We investigated both hedonic well-being (depressive symptoms and happiness) and eudaimonic well-being (self-esteem, personal mastery, and psychological wellness—a composite measure of Ryff’s eudaimonic well-being scales). We evaluated self-assessed health as an important dimension of physical health status. We also included a measure of binge drinking to evaluate an alternative pathway of expression for psychological distress (or negative affect), which might be particularly relevant for men.

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Weighted Percentage Distribution (Unweighted N) for Death of Parents During Five Years