Farewell to Moms? Maternal Contact for Seven Countries in 1986 and 2001

Challenging the popular narrative of the long-run decline of the extended family, contemporary studies of intergenerational relations insist that the ties between adult children and their parents are increasing in importance. Although research documents a decline in multigenerational households, there is little empirical evidence on changes over time in other dimensions of intergenerational solidarity. Drawing on 1986 and 2001 data from the International Social Survey Programme, the authors analyzed trends in maternal contact in 7 Western countries: (a) Australia, (b) Austria, (c) Germany (West), (d) Great Britain, (e) Hungary, (f) Italy, and (g) the United States (N = 7,578). They found no evidence that adult children's contact with mothers became less frequent. In particular, contacts that do not require face-to-face interaction increased, consistent with the diffusion of cell phones and Internet use over the period. Although theorizing points to demographic developments as driving trends in intergenerational cohesion, changes in population composition played only a minor role.Key Words: cross-national, decomposition analysis, demography, intergenerational relations, social support, social trends.The fortunes of intergenerational family relationships are widely debated. One tradition, based on modernization theory, describes kinship relations as losing out to the ascendant nuclear family of parents and minor children (Burgess, 1926; Le Play, 1875). A competing narrative has emerged to emphasize the resilience and resurgence of kinship ties, in particular between adult children and their parents (Bengtson, 2001; Swartz, 2009). The argument for increasing kin cohesion extrapolates from contemporary family life and from trends in personal characteristics known to be associated with family solidarity, but empirical evidence is limited. The decline-of-the-extended-family thesis is consistent with the long-run decrease in multigenerational households, but living arrangements capture only one dimension of family life (Bengtson & Roberts, 1991). Indeed, arguments for the resurgence in family solidarity point to affection, consensus, contact, and exchanges between the adult generations in contemporary families (Swartz). Seldom benchmarked against historical data, this evidence does not speak to change in intergenerational cohesion. Capitalizing on rare trend data on associational solidarity, we examined recent changes in the frequency of maternal contact in the context of changing populations and improving communication and transportation technologies. By assessing the impact of demographic shifts, the analyses also integrated measures of proximity into models of maternal visits and other contacts to test novel hypotheses about changes in intergenerational cohesion.For a recent 15 -year period, we measured changes in the frequency of maternal contact. We moved beyond research on trends in structural cohesion (e.g., coresidence, demographic availability of kin) to consider the interaction dimension of adult family solidarity for mothers and children, the strongest of kinship ties (Rossi & Rossi, 1990). We considered not only face-toface visits but also other contacts (e.g., phone calls), which are less vulnerable to geographic separation but more sensitive to the diffusion of new communication technologies. Arguments for a resurgence of intergenerational solidarity are usually extrapolated from population shifts in the correlates of kin cohesion. A better specified model, including a measure of proximity, would improve on other formal analyses of demographic determinants. This leads to different conclusions regarding the demographic case for family solidarity, the direction of the underlying trend, and the contributions of particular variables. In considering seven societies with distinctive cultural and historical heritages, we used a broader comparative analysis to assess whether there is a general trend in intergenerational relationships or merely idiosyncratic developments that reflect the unique circumstances of various countries. …