THURSDAY, August 12, 2010 (Health.com) — Some kids continue to be their parents’ pride and joy for years after they’ve flown the nest. But the pleasure parents can experience from a grown child’s success cuts both ways, new research suggests.
When adult children divorce, struggle financially, abuse drugs, or have similar life problems, it can have a major impact on their parents’ mental health and satisfaction, according to a study presented today at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, in San Diego. And having other, successful offspring isn’t enough to counteract the distress caused by just one struggling child, the researchers found.
“Close relationships have a big effect on both psychological and physical well-being,” says Karen Fingerman, PhD, the lead author of the study and a gerontologist at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Ind.
“Grown kids aren’t just any relationship,” Fingerman adds. “People have a very strong investment in their kids, particularly in midlife, when they’ve just finished raising them.”
Fingerman and her colleagues surveyed more than 600 parents between the ages of 40 and 60 who live in the Philadelphia area and collectively have about 1,250 children over the age of 18.
Roughly 15% of the parents said that all of their children were successful, and another 15% said that none of their children was. The majority of the parents—just over two-thirds—said they had at least one adult child who had experienced a problem or setback recently.
Some of the problems were the result of bad luck (unexpected illnesses, for instance), but more than half were related to behavior or lifestyle, and included relationship problems, drug or alcohol abuse, and money trouble.
Not surprisingly, parents with successful children were more likely to report higher life satisfaction and fewer symptoms of depression. But if parents had just one struggling child, the resulting distress tended to overshadow the well-being and happiness they derived from their other, more successful children—especially if the child’s problems were self-made rather than a case of misfortune.
“We thought that a successful kid might cancel out the problem kid, but that wasn’t the case,” Fingerman says. “We were a little bit surprised by that.”
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