Abstract
The mother-child relationship may well be the most salient and enduring relationship in human experience, and its importance does not stop when the child reaches adulthood. When Troll (1972) asked adult women and men of a wide age range to describe a person they knew, mothers and fathers were spontaneously referred to more frequently than any other persons. Baruch and Barnett (1983) found in a recent study that midlife women generally have very positive feelings about their mothers, and indeed their sense of well-being was tied to the quality of that relationship. Further, mothers relate to their offspring as adults for a much longer period than they relate to them as children (Goldberg and Deutsch, 1977, p. 317), and the time period during which mother and child relate to each other as adults is increasing. As Hagestad (1981) has pointed out, increased life expectancy is producing longer-term intergenerational bonds and, increasingly, the possibility that parents and children will grow old together. And because women generally outlive their husbands, it is mostly mothers and daughters who grow old together, often one or both having been widowed or divorced.
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Wood, V., Traupmann, J., Hay, J. (1984). Motherhood in the Middle Years. In: Baruch, G., Brooks-Gunn, J. (eds) Women in Midlife. Women in Context: Development and Stresses. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-7823-5_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-7823-5_10
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