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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Mothers' favoritism in later life
— the role of children's birth order | | Author(s) | J Jill Suitor, Karl Pillemer |
| Journal title | Research on Aging, vol 29, no 1, January 2007 |
| Pages | pp 32-55 |
| Keywords | Mother ; Attitude ; Family relationships ; Children [offspring] ; Social surveys ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | Massachusetts town lists were the source for a sample of 426 older mothers, whose relationships with their 1823 adult children were explored in terms of birth order and parental favouritism. The findings demonstrate that birth order continues to play an important role in explaining favouritism when parents enter later stages of the life course. Whereas last-born adult children were most likely to be named as those to whom their mothers were most emotionally close, firstborn children were most likely to be chosen as those to whom mothers would turn when facing personal problems or crises. Further analyses revealed that these patterns remained largely unaffected by family size, race and child spacing. Middle-born children were substantially underrepresented in mothers' choices: such a pattern is particularly striking, considering that the number of middle-born children far exceeded that of firstborn and last-born children in the sample. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-070131205 A |
| Classmark | SRM: DP: DS:SJ: SS: 3F: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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