Paternal and maternal love for married and unmarried sons and daughters

Parental love has been studied in relation to infants and younger children. The adult sons and daughters who marry and become parents constitute another category of ‘children’. As the earlier literature did not explore parental love in relation to these ‘adult married sons and daughters’ earlier, the current study was the first-ever effort in this regard. The study was conducted in two phases and involved 982 purposely selected participants. A new scale to measure love was also developed and validated during the two phases of the study. The findings revealed significant differences in paternal and maternal love between married and unmarried sons and daughters. The findings of the study would serve as a novel contribution to the existing literature on parental love. The newly developed ‘Love Scale’ would facilitate future researchers in exploring love in a general way that could be applied to all possible relationships.