title: Surviving Parents' Influence on Adult Children's Depressive Symptoms Following the Death of a First Parent.
abstract: Parents and children are linked across the life course, and they share common experiences. This article focuses on the bereavement experience of adult children's loss of a first parent during adulthood and examines the downward influence of emotional closeness with a surviving parent on adult children's depressive symptoms following loss. Analyses are based on adult children who experienced the death of a first parent (N = 227), drawn from the Longitudinal Study of Generations, a study of three-and four-generation families from Southern California. Multilevel lagged dependent variable models indicate that an emotionally close relationship with a surviving parent is related with fewer post-bereavement depressive symptoms when a mother survives a father, but not vice versa. This analysis extends the theory of linked lives and highlights the mutual influence parents and children exert, as well as the complex role of gender in shaping family relationships.
authors.affiliation: Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA jeffrey.stokes@bc.edu.
authors.forename: Jeffrey E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Stokes
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D032721:Adult Children / Q000523:psychology*; D001601:Bereavement; D003863:Depression / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D005219:Father-Child Relations; D005220:Fathers; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016901:Intergenerational Relations; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009034:Mother-Child Relations / Q000523:psychology*; D009035:Mothers; D063129:Parental Death; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D012737:Sex Factors
keywords: death/bereavement; gender and family; intergenerational; parent–child relations; quantitative