Adult Children's Monitoring Their Older Parents' Lives

Adult children's monitoring of their older parents' lives can cause tension in the relationship. The goal of this paper is to better understand 1) adult children's beliefs about what areas of their parents' lives they are obligated to monitor, 2) how adult children's beliefs about monitoring processes vary with age, gender, parent functioning, and contact, and 3) the association between monitoring processes and adult children's feelings towards their parents. It extends the literature on monitoring processes during later adulthood by distinguishing between older children's beliefs that they should monitor their parents, their knowledge of their parents' lives, and their beliefs about the extent to which parents are transparent in sharing information. Three hundred and eighty-one adult children in the United States completed a cross-sectional online survey. All respondents had at least one living parent with whom they were in contact at least once a month (N = 381, Mage = 60.03, SD = 7.67, age range = 45-74, 64% female, 85% White). A principal component analysis identified three areas adult children felt obligated to monitor: risk of exploitation, medical risk, and risk behaviors. Perceived monitoring responsibility and lack of parent transparency predicted fewer positive feelings and more negative and ambivalent feelings towards parents. Adult children who believed their parents were less transparent had less positive feelings and more negative and ambivalent feelings about their parents. More knowledge was associated with positive but not negative feelings or ambivalence. These results highlight the importance of understanding monitoring as a communication process.