Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
16th European Sociological Association, Porto, Portekiz, 27 - 30 Ağustos 2024
Motherhood
ideologies are powerful cultural forces which exert tremendous pressure on
women of younger children. However, mothering adult children is a topic that
has received little attention in both family and gerontology scholarship. The
popular notion of the parental role drastically transforming and even
disappearing when children transition to adulthood, often idealized as
clear-cut independence from one’s parents in Western cultures, may explain the
relatively scant attention to motherhood in later life. In this paper, I examine the expectations and experiences of older
mothers of adult children to understand how they compare to earlier mothering with
a cross-cultural comparison between Turkey and the U.S. The data for this study
come from semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with 23 American and 21
Turkish mothers who are above 60 years old and have at least two living adult
children of their own. Mothers in both samples identified ways in which their
experiences with motherhood for adult children differed significantly from
their experiences with younger children but were still important. Yet, how they
interpreted their motherly responsibilities to their adult children varied between
two countries due to the cultural values of independence at adulthood vs. familism.
The most striking differences were in how normative they considered financial
support and giving advice. These expectations were also subjected to changing
needs and demands of their adult children. This study contributes to the
literature by showing how mothering activities and expectations are subject to
change in later life and shaped by cultural context.