Young adult children traveling with parents: insights on conflict and its causes

Abstract

Contrary to prior research, this study investigates the darker side of the parents-children holiday to examine travel conflicts in family trips with 18 to 30-year-old adult children and their causes in adult children's eyes. Three-step analysis of interviews and netnography reveal five types of parent-adult children conflicts in pre-and during-travel stage, namely, travel choice and consumption, travel involvement level, schedule, and unreasonable parental behavior. These conflicts are caused by intergenerational differences and personal characteristics. The findings enrich our understandings of the needs and wants of different generational family travelers which can support businesses to design family travel products better.

Adult children traveling with parents: exploring travel conflict and parents’ subjective well-being

“…As a common social phenomenon in the era of mass tourism, family travel has received academic attention since the 1970s (Jenkins, 1978). Family travel is a time that spent together by family members that is different from their daily routines and full of joy and bliss, but it may also involve contradictions and conflicts (Jia et al , 2022; Yao et al , 2020). Notably, there are obvious differences in family structure between Eastern and Western cultures, which leads to various types of family travel (Lehto et al , 2017).…”

“…In recent years, studies on adult children traveling with parents are scattered in the aspects of travel motivation (Wang et al , 2018), decision-making (Yang et al , 2020a), benefits (Miyakawa and Oguchi, 2022) and conflicts (Jia et al , 2022; Yao et al , 2020). Under the influence of Confucianism and filial piety culture, adult children treat traveling with their parents as a way to show filial piety (Fu et al , 2019).…”

“…Adult children traveling with their parents is a special form of family travel that satisfies the needs of both adult children and their parents for family togetherness (Yang et al , 2020a). However, the extant studies, especially in the Western context, mainly focus on the couple travel (Lee et al , 2020) and the young children’s family travel (Khoo-Lattimore et al , 2018; Li et al , 2017a; Wu et al , 2019), few researchers have examined the adult children traveling with their senior parents (Fu et al , 2019, 2021; Wang et al , 2018; Yao et al , 2020). China, a collectivist society influenced by Confucianism, exhibits unique family structure and function (Wang et al , 2018).…”

“…Until recently, the phenomenon of adult children traveling with their parents has attracted attention from scholars who suggested that such travel type could create pleasant memories (Lee and Lee, 2021), enhance family bonds, improve quality of life (Jepson et al , 2019) and family members’ well-being (Miyakawa and Oguchi, 2022). Prior research has largely focused on the positive effects of adult children traveling with their parents, its negative effects on parents’ well-being remain underexplored (Gram et al , 2018) with few exceptions made by Wang et al (2018) and Yao et al (2020) who analyzed the causes, manifestations and coping methods of intergenerational conflicts during trips using qualitative approaches. Due to the fact that adult children and their parents grow up in completely different environments, these two generations tend to have different values and consumption patterns, which causes increasing collisions between adult children and their parents while traveling (Fu et al , 2019; Yao et al , 2020).…”

“…Prior research has largely focused on the positive effects of adult children traveling with their parents, its negative effects on parents’ well-being remain underexplored (Gram et al , 2018) with few exceptions made by Wang et al (2018) and Yao et al (2020) who analyzed the causes, manifestations and coping methods of intergenerational conflicts during trips using qualitative approaches. Due to the fact that adult children and their parents grow up in completely different environments, these two generations tend to have different values and consumption patterns, which causes increasing collisions between adult children and their parents while traveling (Fu et al , 2019; Yao et al , 2020). Thus, the impact of such intergenerational conflicts needs to be explored.…”