Intergenerational coresidence and contact: A longitudinal analysis of adult children's response to their mother's widowhood

In this article, we are interested in seeing how a father's death affects adult children's relationships with their mothers. We also examine whether our understanding of change in intergenerational relationships over the life course is improved by the use of panel data. For this purpose we use the first and second interviews of the National Survey of Families and Households. Our results and those of previous analyses that use cross-sectional data find little relationship between a mother's widowhood and increased intergenerational social support. However, in the longitudinal analysis, we find that widowhood affects contact between mothers and their adult children. This indicates that cross-sectional analyses can produce misleading results.