Filial Maturity and Caregiving to Aging Parents

Abstract

The aging of parents results in changes in the filial relationship. The increasing vulnerability of parents leads adult children to realize that they have individual needs and cannot fully function as sources of security and protection, as they did before. Simultaneously, the evidence of losses and disability imposes the need for care, which tends to be assumed by adult children. Therefore, there is a progressive change in the volume of support exchanges between parents and children, with more support from adult children to parents. The way adult children adapt to these transitions is influenced by several internal and relational factors. Filial maturity has been associated with filial caregiving towards aging parents. The concept of filial maturity describes a developmental stage in which the adult child overcomes the filial crisis, realizing and accepting that the parent also needs support and comfort and starting to relate to him/her beyond the strictly parental role. Thus, this study aims to explore the role of attachment and mental representation of caregiving in filial maturity. A total of 304 children aged between 35 and 64 years old participated in this study, with at least one of the living parents aged 65 years or older, not institutionalized. Attachment was assessed with the Adult Attachment Scale, mental representation of caregiving with the Mental Representations of Caregiving Scale and filial maturity with the Filial Maturity Measure. The results suggest that attachment, mental representation of caregiving and the interaction between the two explain 24.5% (p < 0.01) of variability in Comprehending and 11.1% (p < 0.05) of variability in Distance, two dimensions of filial maturity. These findings suggest that it is important to consider mental representation of caregiving and attachment when adult children must adapt to changes in the filial relationship and to the need to care for parents.