Parent-Child Disconnectedness and Older European Adults' Mental Health: Do Patterns Differ by Marital Status and Gender?

Abstract

Objective: 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 eight waves (2004-2022) of the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe (SHARE, n=216,469) and multivariable pooled OLS 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 percent among older adults in their first marriages to 13-14 percent among divorced and remarried men and 17 percent 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 non-familial ties rather than re-establishing potentially distressing ties with a disconnected child.