Parent-child disconnectedness and older European adults' mental health: do patterns Differ by marital status and gender?
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2025-05-08
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L. Jessee, D. Carr. 2025. "Parent-Child Disconnectedness and Older European Adults' Mental Health: Do Patterns Differ by Marital Status and Gender?" Journals of Gerontology - Series B Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Volume 80, Issue 6, pp.gbaf024-. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbaf024
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Disconnectedness from one's adult child(ren) can undermine older adults' well-being. However, the psychological consequences of disconnectedness may differ across marital contexts and by gender. Drawing on stress and normative violation frameworks, we examine the association between parent-child disconnectedness and European older adults' depressive symptoms, and the extent to which these patterns differ by marital status (married, remarried, cohabiting, divorced, widowed, and never married) and gender. METHODS: We used pooled data from 8 waves (2004-2022) of the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe (SHARE, n = 216,469) and multivariable pooled ordinary least squares regression to evaluate whether marital status and gender moderate the association between disconnectedness and depressive symptoms. Analyses were adjusted for socioeconomic, health, survey year, and contextual covariates. RESULTS: Disconnectedness rates range from 1% among older adults in their first marriages to 13%-14% among divorced and remarried men and 17% among never-married men. Men have consistently higher rates of disconnectedness than women. Parent-child disconnectedness is associated with heightened depressive symptoms in many marital and gender categories. However, moderation analyses show the strongest associations in marital contexts in which disconnectedness is rare (first marriage, especially among women). Disconnectedness also is associated with heightened depressive symptoms among widowed and divorced persons, yet has negligible effects among remarried persons. DISCUSSION: We discuss the implications of disconnectedness for older adults' socioemotional and caregiving needs. We encourage interventions that focus on engaging older adults' supportive familial or nonfamilial ties rather than reestablishing potentially distressing ties with a disconnected child.
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© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Gerontological Society of America. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.