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Parental Practices and Willingness to Ask for Children's Help Later in Life

Section on Socio-Environmental Studies, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland

Address correspondence to Carmi Schooler, Ph.D., Section on Socio-Environmental Studies, Intramural Research Program, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, 6101 Executive Boulevard, Suite 360, Room 362, MSC 8408, Bethesda, MD 20892-8408. E-mail: carmi.schooler{at}nih.gov

We examine how parents' relationships with their 13- to 25-year-old offspring affect the parents' willingness to ask them for help with financial and personal problems 20 years later. Husbands and wives were interviewed in 1974 and 1994; a child was interviewed in 1974. We used two aspects of parental style, responsiveness and restrictive dominance, to predict parents' willingness to request help from a child 20 years later. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed the following: (a) mothers' willingness to ask an adult child for help with a personal problem was increased by higher levels of responsiveness; (b) mothers' willingness to ask for financial help was increased by responsive and decreased by restrictive-dominant maternal behavior; and (c) neither responsive nor restrictive-dominant paternal behavior affected fathers' later willingness to ask an adult child for help of either kind.