The proposed research will explore the determinants and consequences of parental involvement in children in 3 generations: adults over 60, 40-59, and under 40 years of age on 3 topics: (1) The impact of parental values and involvement with children during childhood and adolescence upon adult status attainment of the children, with status attainment broadly defined to embrace family, educational and occupational status. Variables on family of origin and parental involvement will include support, affection, encouragement, strictness of rules, skill transmission, and the quality and stability of the parental marriage. (2) The study will explore contemporary parent-adult child relations for elderly parents and middle-aged children vs. middle-aged parents and adult children on affective involvement, interaction and helping patterns, as a function of earlier parent-child relations and age-related conditions of economic, physical and emotional need. (3) Normative obligations felt by parents to children and children to parents, under a set of hypothetical life-crisis questions, as a function of early family relations and contemporary conditions of age-related needs. This topic will be designed in a factorial survey mode. The data will be gathered from two samples of adults: a 1500-case area probability sample of adults in metropolitan Boston, using personal interviews; and a lineage sample generated by referrals from middle-aged adults in the main survey to their adult children and parents, using telephone interviews. The research design draws upon previous research on status attainment, family and kinship structures, life span and life course development, and cohort analysis. The study is unique in several respects: (1) its exploration of the influence of early family relations for contemporary patterns of inter-generational contact and helping patterns; (2) its operational definition of status attainment to include family and work variables; (3) its effort to study 3-to-5 person lineages and to predict the conditions conducive to lineage cohesion or fragmentation; and (4) the application of a factorial survey design to an important family issue, the helping pattern between proximate and alternate generations in a family line.
