How Widowhood and Gender Shape the Impact of Maternal Favoritism on Adult Children’s Psychological Well-Being

Abstract

Abstract Objectives Our goal was to extend research on within-family differences in mother–child relations in later life by focusing on 2 social structural characteristics of mothers and offspring that may play important roles in shaping the impact of maternal favoritism on adult children’s depressive symptoms—mother’s marital status and child’s gender. Methods Mixed-methods data were collected as part of the Within-Family Differences Study from 641 adult children nested within 273 families in which: (a) there were at least 2 living adult siblings, and (b) mothers were married or widowed. Results Multilevel analyses indicated that perceiving oneself as the child to whom one’s mother was most emotionally close was a strong predictor of higher depressive symptoms among daughters of widowed mothers; in contrast, perceptions of favoritism did not predict depressive symptoms among sons of either widowed or married mothers, or daughters of married mothers. Qualitative analyses revealed that daughters, but not sons, of widowed mothers tended to attribute their greater closeness with their mothers to their roles as their mothers’ “emotional caregivers,” particularly solo caregivers, during times when mothers faced negative life events that neither they nor their children could control or ameliorate. Discussion The quantitative and qualitative findings we present underscore how social structural positions—in this case, mother’s marital status and child’s gender—combine with social psychological processes to shape how parent–child relations affect children’s well-being in adulthood.