Maria the Tutor

Parents and Extended Family Relationships

Summary

1. The relationship a child experiences with his or her parents while growing up continues to exert a profound influence on that person as an adult. Both satisfying and disruptive memories and emotions may be carried into marriage.

2. Parent-child relationships become particularly important in the mate selection process. Parents may try to influence a child’s choice of spouse. Parental objections to a child’s choice of spouse may drive the couple into each other’s arms. Rebellion against parents also impairs children’s judgment in choosing a spouse.

3. People can do several things when parents disapprove of their spouse choice. They can try to get their parents to like their spouse and can give their parents time and opportunity to get acquainted. They can discuss the situation with their parents, and they can get premarital counseling.

4. In health families, children identify with the roles of their parents ad learn what mother, father, and spouse are like from their parents. Identification may be positive or negative.

5. People may develop unrealistic or unhealthy expectation about marriage from the example set by their own parents.

6. Despite myths to the contrary, families are a major source of help to elderly persons.

7. Conflicting ideas of inclusion and exclusion are a source of tension in mother-daughter relationships. Daughters may feel mothers are intrusive, mothers may feel excluded.

8. Conflicted relationships between adult children and parents can be a source of stress for all generations.

9. Because people are living longer and because a greater percentage of the population is considered elderly, families are now providing more care to their older members who may need considerable help.

10. The roots of in-law conflict may include the following: partners’ negative conditioning to expect trouble, their immaturity, the parents’ resentment of the spouse selected, and parents who cannot let their child go and who are overprotective and meddling.

11. Most young couples do not want to live with their parents after marriage, and parents do not want to live with them. When doubling up is necessary, harmony is more likely when each couple has their own space and when obligations and responsibilities have been discussed ahead of time.

12. There has been an increase in the number and percentage of young people who accept the idea of sharing a home with an elderly relative, but older people give up their independence and share residence with an adult child typically when forced by circumstances such as economic difficulties or divorce.

13. Demographic trends have resulted in more living grandparents and fewer grandchildren per grandparent.

14. Today’s grandparents are healthier and live longer than their predecessors and are typically open to continued growth, experiences, and development will into late life.

15. Many coupes appreciate grandparents for all they do for them and their children.

16. Grandparents can help grandchildren feel secure and loved; play a crucial role during family transitions such as divorce; help grandchildren learn to know, trust, and understand other people; give grand children a sense of history; provide grandchildren with supervision and expeirneces that parent do not have the time or money to do; give grandchildren a sense of values and a philosophy of life based on their years of living; play the role of arbitrator between adult children and grandchildren; and give grandchildren a wholesome attitude toward old age.

17. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of grandparents who are raising their grandchildren.

18. Grandparent also can be important in the lives of adolescents and young adults. The maternal grandmother-granddaughter bond is the strongest of the grandparent-grandchild bonds, but paternal grandfathers and grandsons have a more intense bond than do maternal grandfathers and grandsons. Parents heavily influence the grandparent-grandchild relationship.

19. Grandchildren also can do many things for grandparents; provide a source of biological continuity and a sense that the family will endure, enhance grandparents overcome social isolation, and provide physical assistance.

20. For many, the rivalry experiences between siblings throughout childhood and adolescence begins to diminish in adulthood and gives way to more emotionally mature relationships with greater degrees of closeness.