(Press-News.org) AMES, Iowa - Mothers are often the caregiver when a child is sick, and that motherly instinct doesn't go away when the child is an adult. In fact, mothers provide more support to adult children with a serious health condition than to their other children, according to new research that will be presented at the American Sociological Association 2015 Annual Meeting.
It's a situation that can put older mothers in a vulnerable position, said Megan Gilligan, lead author and assistant professor of human development and family studies at Iowa State University. Gilligan and researchers from Purdue and Cornell universities found mothers of seriously ill adult children gave more support than they received.
"These mothers are not receiving a lot of practical assistance, such as help around the house with chores or help when they're sick or not feeling well," Gilligan said. "These are mothers who are in their late 70s and early 80s, which is normatively a time when they stop giving their children as much support and they start receiving support from their children."
The study, published online in The Gerontologist, looked at two types of support - instrumental and expressive - between mothers and their adult children. Instrumental support can include help running errands or preparing meals, while expressive support is more comfort and encouragement.
Researchers were surprised by the amount of support mothers were also providing to their healthy children. Since the child with a health condition received more help, they expected the healthy children would receive less, but that was not the case.
"What is intriguing about the findings from this particular paper is that they show that even when mothers provide increased support to offspring with serious health problems, it does not reduce mothers' support to her other children," said Jill Suitor, professor of sociology at Purdue. "In fact, it appears that mothers just expand their provision of support overall."
Healthy children need to step up
The research shows children gave expressive, but less instrumental support to their mothers. The lack of instrumental support is significant because 56.8 percent of the mothers in the study reported needing help in the last two years because of an injury or illness. Gilligan says it's important to recognize the impact an illness can have on a family.
"When someone has a health condition or an illness, we think of it as a characteristic of the individual, but these findings show that it's really a family affair. When an adult child has a serious health condition, it has implications for the mother and also for the siblings," Gilligan said. "This is a time when their healthy children do need to provide more support or additional outside assistance."
The study used data collected as part of the Within-Family Differences Study II, a project founded in 2001 by Suitor and Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell, and funded by the National Institute on Aging. For this paper, researchers used data collected from 369 older mothers about their relationships and interactions with 1,338 of their adult children.
Nearly half of the families in the study had at least one child with a serious health condition. The median age for mothers was 78 years old, and the median age for children was 49. Suitor says the findings are beneficial for practitioners who work with later-life families.
"In particular, under circumstances in which mothers are providing high levels of assistance to children with health problems, it may be important for health care professionals to encourage healthy children in the family to provide their mothers with more help to reduce mothers' high levels of care responsibilities," Suitor said.
Researchers controlled for proximity, marital status, education, deviant behaviors and employment to make sure these factors did not influence levels of support.
INFORMATION:
Marissa Rurka and Gulcin Con, both graduate students at Purdue University, also contributed to this study.
Researchers from North Carolina State University, Institut Langevin and Paris-Descartes University have conducted a proof-of-concept study that raises the possibility of using ultrasound techniques to detect cervical stiffness changes that indicate an increased risk of preterm labor in pregnant women. While additional work needs to be done, it may ultimately give doctors a new tool for determining when to provide treatment that can prevent preterm birth.
Premature births can mean low birthweights and other medical problems for newborns, but there are steps that doctors ...
An international research team reports results of a three-year study of sediment samples collected offshore from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in a new paper published August 18, 2015, in the American Chemical Society's journal, Environmental Science and Technology.
The research aids in understanding what happens to Fukushima contaminants after they are buried on the seafloor off coastal Japan.
Led by Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist and marine chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the team found that a small fraction of contaminated ...
Only 1 in 10 heart failure patients is referred to a cardiac rehabilitation program after being hospitalized, despite strong evidence that such exercise programs improve quality of life and reduce the likelihood of future hospitalizations.
The findings, from a UCLA-led study, appear in the August 25 Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Researchers drew the data from a national database of more than 100,000 people with heart failure who were discharged from hospitals between 2005 and 2014 and were eligible for cardiac rehabilitation programs.
"Although we expected ...
A new class of fascinating technologies -- including optics in computing, telecommunications links and switches, and virtually any other optical component -- could be created simply by configuring a mesh of light-controlling devices known as interferometers. This is similar to the way electronic semiconductors can fashion the wide array of digital technologies we have at our disposal today.
Optical technologies have the potential to greatly reduce the power consumption of computers, speed telecommunications, and enhance the sensitivity of chemical and biological sensors. ...
A national survey of more than 750 emergency medical services providers conducted by researchers at Oregon Health & Science University identified airway management skills, personal anxiety and limited pediatric care proficiency among key factors that may contribute to pediatric safety events for children in out-of-hospital emergent care situations. The study, published online today in The Journal of Pediatrics, supports the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation for pediatric physician involvement in EMS training, medical oversight and policy development.
"Pediatric ...
Violent conflicts in Neolithic Europe were held more brutally than has been known so far. This emerges from a recent anthropological analysis of the roughly 7000-year-old mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten by researcher of the Universities of Basel and Mainz. The findings, published in the journal PNAS, show that victims were murdered and deliberately mutilated.
It was during the time when Europeans first began to farm. To what degree conflicts and wars featured in the early Neolithic (5600 to 4900 B.C.), and especially in the so-called Linear Pottery culture ...
A study of catsharks reveals how alterations in the expression and function of certain genes in limb buds underlie the evolution of fish fins to limbs. The findings are reported by researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG, Barcelona) and their collaborators in the journal eLife and give new insight into how fish evolved to live on land in the form of early tetrapods.
The first four-legged, land-living creatures - known as early tetrapods - evolved from fish, following the transformation of fins into limbs. This ...
Patient satisfaction is a very poor proxy for quality of care comparisons in elective cranial neurosurgery. Because deaths are rare events in elective cranial neurosurgery, reporting of surgeon or even department-specific mortality figures cannot differentiate a high or low level of the quality of care.
The current focus on patient safety in health care has led to public quality-of-care comparisons between health care facilities and even between individual health care professionals. In the United States, a new reimbursement method based on patient satisfaction ratings ...
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - New research findings contradict a fundamental assumption about the functioning of "organic" solar cells made of low-cost plastics, suggesting a new strategy for creating inexpensive solar technology.
Commercialization of organic solar cells has been hindered by inefficiencies, but the findings point toward a potential path to create a new class of solar technology able to compete with standard silicon cells.
"These solar cells could provide a huge cost advantage over silicon," said Muhammad Ashraful Alam, Purdue University's Jai N. Gupta Professor ...
A new international study is the first to use a high-resolution, large-scale computer model to estimate how much ice the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could lose over the next couple of centuries, and how much that could add to sea-level rise. The results paint a clearer picture of West Antarctica's future than was previously possible. The study is published today (18 August) in The Cryosphere, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).
"The IPCC's [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] 4th and 5th Assessment Reports both note that the acceleration ...
