Objectives
Our goal was to extend research on within-family differences in mother-child relations in later-life by focusing on two social structural characteristics of mothers and offspring that may play important roles in shaping the impact of maternal favoritism on adult children’s depressive symptoms—mother’s marital status and child’s gender.
Methods
Mixed-methods data were collected as part of the Within-Family Differences Study from 641 adult children nested within 273 families in which: a) there were at least two living adult siblings, and b) mothers were married or widowed.
Results
Multilevel analyses indicated that perceiving oneself as the child to whom one’s mother was most emotionally close was a strong predictor of higher depressive symptoms among daughters of widowed mothers; in contrast, perceptions of favoritism did not predict depressive symptoms among sons of either widowed or married mothers, or daughters of married mothers. Qualitative analyses revealed that daughters, but not sons, of widowed mothers tended to attribute their greater closeness with their mothers to their roles as their mothers’ “emotional caregivers,” particularly solo caregivers, during times when mothers face negative life events that neither they nor their children can control or ameliorate.
Discussion
The quantitative and qualitative findings we present underscore how social structural positions—in this case, mother’s marital status and child’s gender—combine with social psychological processes to shape how parent-child relations affect children’s well-being in adulthood.
COVID-19 led to work hour reductions and layoffs for many Americans with wage/salary jobs. Some gig work, however, which is usually considered precarious, remained available. We examine whether people doing gig microtasks right before the pandemic increased their microtask hours during COVID-19 and whether those changes helped them financially. Using data from workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform from February, March, and April of 2020, we find that roughly one third of existing workers increased their microtask hours. Increases were larger for people who lost household income or wage/salary hours. Spending more time on microtasks, however, did little to help workers financially. Furthermore, the people most reliant on microtasks before the pandemic had worse financial outcomes than others. In short, even though microtask work might seem like a good way for people to recoup lost income during the pandemic, it was of limited utility even for the experienced workers in our sample.
Prior scholarship demonstrates that older mothers receive more care from daughters, prefer daughters as caregivers, and have stronger emotional bonds with daughters. Despite these clear gendered differences in care, care preferences, and closeness, less is known about whether the presence of daughters in a family affects mother-adult son relationships or whether the presence of sons in a family affects mother-adult daughter relationships. Drawing from theories of gender socialization and social exchange, we propose that mothers would, given the choice between daughters and sons, prefer to receive care from and engage in emotional exchanges with daughters. Therefore, we predict sons’ care to and emotional closeness with older mothers will be inversely related to the number of daughters in the family. We test our hypotheses with mixed-method data from 1,577 mother-adult child dyads nested within 420 families collected as part of the Within-Family Differences Study-II. Findings support our hypotheses. The larger the number of daughters, the less likely sons are to provide care to their mothers, whereas the likelihood of daughters providing care is unaffected by the number of sons. Similarly, the larger the number of daughters, the lower closeness mothers report with their sons, whereas mother-adult daughter closeness is unrelated to the number of sons. In sum, our findings show ways in which both an adult child’s gender and the gender composition of their sibship affect mother-adult child relationships, as well as highlighting the applicability of theories of gender socialization and social exchange to the context of aging families.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.