Parental practices and willingness to ask for children's help later in life.
We examine how parents' relationships with their 13- to 25-year-old offspring affect the parents' willingness to ask them for help with financial and personal problems 20 years later. Husbands and wives were interviewed in 1974 and 1994; a child was interviewed in 1974. We used two aspects of parental style, responsiveness and restrictive dominance, to predict parents' willingness to request help from a child 20 years later. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed the following: (a) mothers' willingness to ask an adult child for help with a personal problem was increased by higher levels of responsiveness; (b) mothers' willingness to ask for financial help was increased by responsive and decreased by restrictive-dominant maternal behavior; and (c) neither responsive nor restrictive-dominant paternal behavior affected fathers' later willingness to ask an adult child for help of either kind.
Schooler
Carmi
C
Ph.D., Section on Socio-Environmental Studies, Intramural Research Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, 6101 Executive Boulevard, Suite 360, Room 362, MSC 8408, Bethesda, MD 20892-8408, USA. carmi.schooler@nih.gov
Revell
Andrew J
AJ
Caplan
Leslie J
LJ
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D017028:Caregivers / Q000523:psychology*; D003142:Communication; D004291:Dominance-Subordination; D005219:Father-Child Relations; D005260:Female; D006379:Helping Behavior; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008425:Maternal Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D016487:Parenting / Q000523:psychology*; D010332:Paternal Behavior; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D012944:Social Support; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014481:United States